Fabrication and Characterization of Micromagnet Arrays on Top of GaAs/AlGaAs Heterostructures

Abstract

Using nanolithographic techniques we deposit an array of ferromagnetic dysprosium dots with period a=500 nm on top of GaAs–AlGaAs heterojunctions. The spatially periodic stray fields affect drastically the magnetotransport properties of the electrons in the underlying two-dimensional electron gas and give rise to the long predicted magnetic commensurability oscillations. We show that such a semiconductor-ferromagnet hybrid system can be used to study the magnetic properties of nanoscale particles.