Paper detail

Coherence and stiffness of spin waves in diluted ferromagnets

We present results of a numerical analysis of magnon spectra in supercells simulating two-dimensional and bulk random diluted ferromagnets with long-ranged pair exchange interactions. We show that low-energy spectral regions for these strongly disordered systems contain a coherent component leading to interference phenomena manifested by a pronounced sensitivity of the lowest excitation energies to the adopted boundary conditions. The dependence of configuration averages of these excitation energies on the supercell size can be used for an efficient determination of the spin-wave stiffness D. The developed formalism is applied to the ferromagnetic Mn-doped GaAs semiconductor with optional incorporation of phosphorus; the obtained concentration trends of D are found in reasonable agreement with recent experiments. Moreover, a relation of the spin stiffness to the Curie temperature Tc has been studied for Mn-doped GaAs and GaN semiconductors. It is found that the ratio Tc/D exhibits qualitatively the same dependence on Mn concentration in both systems.