Magnetic and structural properties of manganese ion implanted silicon

This thesis focuses on semiconductor based spin electronics. The integration of ferromagnetic regions into semiconductor "spintronic" devices to produce spin polarized current is a dynamic research area. One avenue is to make conventional semiconductors ferromagnetic by doping with a transition metal impurity such as Mn.; For this, we first investigated the magnetic properties of Mn-implanted Si. We were able to measure above room temperature ferromagnetic hysteresis loops. The high Curie temperature obtained (>400 K), indicated that the synthesis of a technologically useful Si-based magnetic semiconductor is possible. We then focused on studying the structure of the implanted samples in order to establish a correlation between the magnetic and structural properties. The structural investigation involved secondary ion mass spectrometry, Rutherford backscattering, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) as the main characterization techniques.; The combination of the structural and magnetic studies allowed us to isolate an "active" region from which the ferromagnetism originates. We then found that the magnetic properties of the samples are strongly dependant on the interaction of the Mn atoms with the residual implant damage. The evolution of the Mn concentration profiles was also found to be closely related to the distribution of the Si lattice defects. We also observed the formation of Mn rich secondary phases at high enough annealing temperatures >800°C. However, we argued that theses crystallites cannot account for all the observed magnetic properties due to the low Curie temperature of these compounds in bulk form. We concluded that achieving a room temperature Si-based DMS has great potential but careful synthesis of this material system is needed to prevent secondary phase formation.