Spin polarisation and non-isotropic effective mass in the conduction band of GdN

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed computational and spectroscopic analysis of GdN's electronic structure, focusing on spin polarization and anisotropic effective mass, with implications for spintronic device design.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed effective mass tensor calculations for GdN and explores the effects of nitrogen vacancies and doping on its electronic properties.

Findings

Effective mass tensor for undoped GdN provided

Indicative effective mass values for electron-doped GdN presented

Insights into spin polarization and anisotropy in GdN's conduction band

Abstract

GdN is a ferromagnetic semiconductor which has seen increasing interest in the preceding decades particularly in the areas of spin- and superconducting- based electronics. Here we report a detailed computational study and optical spectroscopy study of the electronic structure of stoichiometric and nitrogen vacancy doped GdN. Based on our calculations we provide the effective mass tensor for undoped GdN, and some indicative values for electron doped GdN. Such a property is valuable as it can directly affect device design, and be directly measured experimentally to validate the existing computation results.