This book deals with diluted magnetic semiconductors, a class of materials important to the emerging field of spintronics. In these materials semiconducting properties, both transport and optical, are influenced by the presence of magnetic ions. It concentrates on basic physical mechanisms (e.g. carrier-ion and ion-ion interactions) and resulting phenomena (e.g. magnetic polaron formation and spin relaxation). Introduction to the Physics of Diluted Magnetic Semiconductors is addressed to graduate-level and doctoral students and young researchers entering the field. The authors have been...

Diluted magnetic semiconductors, or semimagnetic semiconductors, seemed for a while to be one of those research topics whose glory (i. e., the period of most ext- sive research) belongedalready to the past. This particularlyapplied to "traditional" diluted magnetic semiconductors, i. e., substitutional alloys of either II-VI or IV-VI semiconductors with transition metal ions. Fortunately, a discovery, in the beg- ning of the nineties 1,2], of ferromagnetic ordering in III-V DMSs with critical temperatures reaching 170 K has renewed and greatly intensi ed an interest in those materials. This...