Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Journal/Book/Conference Title Title
JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS
Volume
122
Issue
15
Abstract
We have investigated the physical mechanism behind magnetization reduction in a potential spingapless semiconducting compound MnCrVAl by analyzing various atomic disorder schemes. In particular, we show that depending on the degree of disorder, exchanging atomic positions between Mn/Cr and V/Al leads to reduced total magnetization due to either spin flip, or vanishing spin magnetic moments. The latter is attributed to the itinerant character of magnetism in Cr-, Mn-, and V-containing Heusler alloys, and to the frustration of antiferromagnetic exchange interactions, and is accompanied by a tetragonal distortion, but such distortion alone (i.e., in a fully ordered crystal, with no atomic disorder) is not sufficient for a transition to zero magnetization. Besides, we demonstrate that in certain disordered structures the spin polarization of MnCrVAl significantly increases, reaching the half-metallic state. Our calculations indicate that exchange of atomic positions of Mn with Cr, and V with Al has no significant effect on electronic and magnetic properties of MnCrVAl. We also show that antisite disorder does not result in significant reduction of magnetization. At the same time, some types of antisite disorder result in essentially 100% spin-polarized structures. These findings may contribute to understanding the role of atomic disorder on magnetic properties of materials with potential applications in spin-based electronics.
Department
Department of Physics
Original Publication Date
10-21-2017
DOI of published version
10.1063/1.4998308
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, University of Northern Iowa, Rod Library
Copyright
@Herran, et al.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Herran, Juliana; Dalal, Rishabh; Gray, Paul; Kharel, Parashu; and Lukashev, Pavel, "Atomic disorder induced modification of magnetization in MnCrVAl" (2017). Faculty Publications. 27.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/phy_facpub/27
Comments
First published in the Journal of Applied Physics, v.122 n.15 (October 2017), by AIP Publishing.