Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-17-2011

Publication Title

Physical Review B

Publisher

The American Physical Society

Abstract

The ground state of a semiconductor superlattice (SL) placed in a tilted magnetic field is shown to exhibit a spin-density wave structure when the energy spectrum favors crossings between opposite-spin Landau minibands. The SL is modeled as an array of infinitely attractive quantum wells, whose single energy level is broadened into a miniband of width when weak interwell tunneling is considered. In the presence of the Coulomb interaction, by tailoring the relationship between and the cyclotron and Zeeman energies, the system transitions between paramagnetic, ferromagnetic, spin-density wave (SDW), and ferromagnetic-paramagnetic stripe ordering. These results are obtained by solving numerically a spin-density-wave gap equation derived at T = 0Kin aself-consistent formalism. We find that for a given value of the difference between the Landau energy and the Zeeman splitting, the initial paramagnetic or ferromagnetic order becomes unstable with respect to the formation of a SDW for within a certain range. At larger , the system exhibits alternate ferromagnetic-paramagnetic stripes. In the SDW regime, the fractional polarization is up to the order of several tens of percent.

Comments

Published version may be found here: http://journals.aps.org/prb/

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