Engineering of spin-lattice relaxation dynamics by digital growth of diluted magnetic semiconductor CdMnTe

The technological concept of “digital alloying” offered by molecular-beam epitaxy is demonstrated to be a very effective tool for tailoring static and dynamic magnetic properties of diluted magnetic semiconductors. Compared to common “disordered alloys” with the same Mn concentration, the spin-lattice relaxation dynamics of magnetic Mn ions has been accelerated by an order of magnitude in (Cd,Mn)Te digital alloys, without any noticeable change in the giant Zeeman spin splitting of excitonic states, i.e. without effect on the static magnetization. The strong sensitivity of the magnetization dynamics to clustering of the Mn ions opens a new degree of freedom for spin engineering.