AVS 50th International Symposium
    Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures Wednesday Sessions
       Session MI-WeP

Paper MI-WeP14
Exploring Spintronic Materials and Structures with Interatomic Potentials

Wednesday, November 5, 2003, 11:00 am, Room Hall A-C

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: D.A. Murdick, University of Virginia
Authors: D.A. Murdick, University of Virginia
X.W. Zhou, University of Virginia
H.N.G. Wadley, University of Virginia
D.G. Pettifor, University of Oxford
D. Nguyen-Manh, University of Oxford
Correspondent: Click to Email
The use of interatomic potentials in atomistic simulations has become a powerful approach for studying the atomic structures of materials. Molecular dynamic atomic simulations allow assembly phenomena encountered during the synthesis of spintronic devices to be analyzed in detail and allow the optimization of process conditions for desired spintronic structures and compounds. This approach has been successfully applied in metal/metal oxide multilayer systems to identify the deposition conditions for creating atomically smooth interfaces with minimized interlayer mixing. The extension of such an approach into semiconductors is very promising. The key to this is the availability of a high fidelity interatomic potential that can accurately describe covalent bonding in doped compound semiconductors and can be used for simulation of vapor deposition to reveal the time-dependent atomic structure as a function of processing conditions. We demonstrate that the existing literature multi-component interatomic potentials are too limited for spintronic applications. We describe a new class of bond-order potentials that overcome these limitations. The bond order potential has been successfully applied for GaAs systems and is being extended to (Ga,Mn)As/GaAs heterostructures and other doped semiconductors of group IV and III-V semiconductors.