A review of bipolar magnetic semiconductors from theoretical aspects

Abstract

Spintronics, which employs electrons’ spin degree of freedom in data storage and transmission, acts as a promising candidate for next-generation information technology owing to its improved processing speed and reduced power consumption. To seek and design materials with highly spin polarized carriers and find an efficient way to control the spin polarization direction of carriers are critical and urgent to spintronics applications. In this aspect, the bipolar magnetic semiconductor (BMS) serves as an ideal solution since it can generate currents with 100% spin polarization, and the direction of spin polarization is easily tunable by an external gate voltage. Up to now, there have been lots of BMSs predicted by first-principles calculations, however, most of them are extrinsically induced by chemical or physical modifications, and a generalized scheme for designing BMS materials is still lacking. This paper is aimed to briefly review the existing BMS materials designed by theoretical simulations, analyze the main obstacles to experimental realization, and put forward suggestions for future development.

Keywords

• Spintronics
• First-principles
• Ferromagnetism
• Antiferromagnetism
• Bipolar magnetic semiconductor (BMS)