  Despite a considerable effort aiming at elucidating the nature of
ferromagnetism in ZnO-based magnetic semiconductor, its origin still remains
debatable. Although the observation of above room temperature ferromagnetism
has been reported frequently in the literature by magnetometry measurement, so
far there has been no report on correlated ferromagnetism in magnetic, optical
and electrical measurements. In this paper, we investigate systematically the
structural, optical, magnetic and electrical properties of Zn1-x Co (x) O:Al
thin films prepared by sputtering with x ranging from 0 to 0.33. We show that
correlated ferromagnetism is present only in samples with x > 0.25. In
contrast, samples with x < 0.2 exhibit weak ferromagnetism only in magnetometry
measurement which is absent in optical and electrical measurements. We
demonstrate, by systematic electrical transport studies that carrier
localization indeed occurs below 20-50 K for samples with x < 0.2; however,
this does not lead to the formation of ferromagnetic phase in these samples
with an electron concentration in the range of 6 x 10(19) cm(-3) 1 x 10(20)
cm(-3). Detailed structural and optical transmission spectroscopy analyses
revealed that the anomalous Hall effect observed in samples with x > 0.25 is
due to the formation of secondary phases and Co clusters.
