Time-resolved Kerr rotation spectroscopy is used to determine the sign of the g factor of carriers in a semiconductor material, with the help of a rotatable magnetic field in the plane of the sample. The spin precession signal of carriers at a fixed time delay is measured as a function of the orientation of the magnetic field with a fixed strength B. The signal has a sine-like form and its phase determines the sign of the g factor of carriers. As a natural extension of previous methods to measure the （time-resolved） photoluminescence or time-resolved Kerr rotation signal as a function of the magnetic field strength with a fixed orientation, such a method gives the correct sign of the g factor of electrons in GaAs. Furthermore, the sign of carriers in a （Ga, Mn）As magnetic semiconductor is also found to be negative.
We carefully investigated the ferromagnetic coupling in the as-grown and annealed ferromagnetic semiconductor GaMnAs/A1GaMnAs bilayer devices. We observed that the magnetic interaction between the two layers strongly affects the magnetoresistance of the GaMnAs layer with applying the out of plane magnetic field. After low temperature annealing, the magnetic easy axis of the A1GaMnAs layer switches from out of plane into in-plane and the interlayer coupling efficiency is reduced from up to 0.6 to less than 0.4. However, the magnetic coupling penetration depth for the annealed device is twice that of the as-grown bilayer device.
CAO YuFeiLI YanYongLI YuanYuanWEI GuanNanJI YangWANG KaiYou
