The electronic structure of homogeneous ferromagnetic (Ga, Mn)N epitaxial films

X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (XAFS) techniques, namely, X-ray Near Edge Structure (XANES), Extended XAFS (EXAFS), and Anomalous X-ray Diffraction (AXRD) were used to investigate the local atomic and electronic structure of (Ga, Mn)N magnetic layers with Mn concentrations of up to 10% grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy. The XANES and AXRD analysis prove the Mn incorporation on substitutional GaN lattice sites. EXAFS results indicate the good quality of the structure under examination, although 0.5 nitride atom vacancies were found. The Wien2k code was applied to interpret the XANES spectra quantitatively, i.e., to determine the electronic structure of the Mn atoms. It was shown that accounting for the core-hole effect is necessary to reconstruct effectively the XANES spectra. Conducted charge density analysis based on DFT calculations identified the valency of Mn atom to be of 2.4+