Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Keywords
Magnetic moments, x-ray diffraction, Crystal structure, Antiferromagnetism, Lattice constants
Journal/Book/Conference Title Title
AIP Advances
Volume
7
Issue
5
Abstract
Recent discovery of a new class of materials, spin-gapless semiconductors (SGS), has attracted considerable attention in the last few years, primarily due to potential applications in the emerging field of spin-based electronics (spintronics). Here, we investigate structural, electronic, and magnetic properties of one potential SGS compound, MnCrVAl, using various experimental and theoretical techniques. Our calculations show that this material exhibits ≈ 0.5 eV band gap for the majority-spin states, while for the minority-spin it is nearly gapless. The calculated magnetic moment for the completely ordered structure is 2.9 µB/f.u., which is different from our experimentally measured value of almost zero. This discrepancy is explained by the structural disorder. In particular, A2 type disorder, where Mn or Cr atoms exchange their positions with Al atoms, results in induced antiferromagnetic exchange coupling, which, at a certain level of disorder, effectively reduces the total magnetic moment to zero. This is consistent with our x-ray diffraction measurements which indicate the presence of A2 disorder in all of our samples. In addition, we also show that B2 disorder does not result in antiferromagnetic exchange coupling and therefore does not significantly reduce the total magnetic moment.
Department
Department of Physics
Original Publication Date
12-19-2016
DOI of published version
10.1063/1.4972797
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, University of Northern Iowa, Rod Library
Copyright
©2016 P. Kharel, J. Herran, P. Lukashev, Y. Jin, J. Waybright, S. Gilbert, B. Staten, P. Gray, S. Valloppilly, Y. Huh, and D. J. Sellmyer. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Date Digital
2016
Language
EN
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Kharel, P.; Herran, J.; Lukashev, Pavel; Jin, Y.; Waybright, J.; Gilbert, S.; Staten, B,; Gray, P.; Valloppilly, S.; Huh, Y.; and Sellmyer, D. J., "Effect of disorder on the magnetic and electronic structure of a prospective spin-gapless semiconductor MnCrVAl" (2016). Faculty Publications. 22.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/phy_facpub/22
Comments
First published in AIP Advances, v. 7 n. 5 (2016), published by American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.4972797