Fachgruppe Nanostrukturierte Materialien    

The rich magnetic anisotropy of compressively strained (Ga,Mn)As has attracted great interest recently. Here the authors discuss a sensitive method to visualize and quantify the individual components of the magnetic anisotropy using transport. A set of high resolution transport measurements is compiled into color coded resistance polar plots, which constitute a fingerprint of the symmetry components of the anisotropy. As a demonstration of the sensitivity of the method, they show that these typically reveal the presence of both the and the [010] uniaxial magnetic anisotropy component in (Ga,Mn)As layers, even when most other techniques reveal only one of these components.