Epitaxial growth of cubic MnSb on GaAs AND InGaAs(111)

The cubic polymorph of the binary transition metal pnictide (TMP) MnSb, c-MnSb, has been predicted to be a robust half-metallic ferromagnetic (HMF) material with minority spin gap ≳1 eV. Here, MnSb epilayers are grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on GaAs and In0.5Ga0.5As(111) substrates and analyzed using synchrotron radiation X-ray diffraction. We find polymorphic growth of MnSb on both substrates, where c-MnSb co-exists with the ordinary niccolite n-MnSb polymorph. The grain size of the c-MnSb is of the order of tens of nanometer on both substrates and its appearance during MBE growth is independent of the very different epitaxial strain from the GaAs (3.1%) and In0.5Ga0.5As (0.31%) substrates