Slater-Pauling behavior and origin of the half-metallicity of the full-Heusler alloys

By I. Galanakis, P. Dederichs, N. Papanikolaou. 2002

1,687 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using the full-potential screened Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method we study the full-Heusler alloys based on Co, Fe, Rh, and Ru. We show that many of these compounds show a half-metallic behavior; however, in contrast to the half-Heusler alloys the energy gap in the minority band is extremely small due to states localized only at the Co (Fe, Rh, or Ru) sites which are not present in the half-Heusler compounds. The full-Heusler alloys show a Slater-Pauling behavior and the total spin magnetic moment per unit cell ${(M}_{t})$ scales with the total number of valence electrons ${(Z}_{t})$ following the rule ${M}_{t}{=Z}_{t}\ensuremath{-}24.$ We explain why the spin-down band contains exactly 12 electrons using arguments based on group theory and show that this rule holds also for compounds with less than 24 valence electrons. Finally we discuss the deviations from this rule and the differences compared to the half-Heusler alloys.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d1433af4e72b3a7d171295b56853f42cd82da0f

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In Condensed Matter Physics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Anomalous hall effect (2009, background): “The full Heusler alloy Co2CrAl has the L21 lattice structure and orders ferromagnetically below 333 K. Sev- eral groups (Block et al., 2004; Galanakis et al., 2002) have argued that the conduction electrons are fully spin polarized (“half metal”).”
Half-metallic ferromagnets: From band structure to many-body effects (2007, methodology): “Several explanations of the band gap have been given in terms of a Ni-Mn interaction only (Galanakis et al., 2002a).”
Giant anomalous Nernst effect and quantum-critical scaling in a ferromagnetic semimetal (2018, methodology): “0 μB) and consistent with the previous calculations based on a full potential method and the expected value from Slater-Pauling rule[7, 8].”
Tunable multifunctional topological insulators in ternary Heusler compounds. (2010, background): “From basic structural and bonding considerations, the X 2 YZ Heusler compounds (L2 1 structure) with 18 or 24 valence electron”