Itinerant ferromagnetism in a spin-fermion model for diluted spin systems

Abstract

We investigate the itinerant ferromagnetism using a diluted spin-fermion model, derived from a repulsive Hubbard model, where itinerant fermions are coupled antiferromagnetically to auxiliary fields in a three-dimensional simple cubic lattice. We focus, in particular, on understanding the spindependent transport properties of the itinerant fermions in the impurity band by taking positional disorder of the auxiliary fields into account. For on-site repulsion U ∼ bandwidth the density of the itinerant carriers confined to the impurity band, play a key role in determining the kinetic energy of the system and consequently the carrier spin polarization. Our semi-classical Monte Carlo calculations show that the ferromagnetic transition temperature of the carrier spins indeed shows an optimization behavior with the carrier density. We calculate the transport properties in details to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the magnetic and transport properties of the carriers. Our results obtained beyond the perturbative regime are significant for understanding the ferromagnetism in diluted magnetic semiconductors.