Electrical and Magnetic Transport Properties of Co₂VGa Half-Metallic Heusler Alloy

Abstract

This study performed a systematic experimental investigation into the structural, magnetic, and transport properties of the Co2VGa Heusler alloy, which was theoretically predicted to exhibit half-metallic ferromagnetism. It has been experimentally found that the studied alloy has a relatively high-ordered L21 cubic structure at room temperature and orders ferromagnetically below ~350 K. Interestingly, by fitting the electric transport data with the properly governing equations in two different temperature regions, the two-magnon scattering process (the T9/2 dependence) appears in the temperature range from 30 to 75 K. Moreover, the magnetoresistance effect changes from a negative value to a positive value when the temperature is below 100 K. Such experimental findings provide indirect evidence that the half-metallic nature of this alloy is retained only when the temperature is below 100 K. On the other hand, the magnetic transport measurements indicate that the anomalous Hall coefficient of this alloy increases when the temperature increases and reaches a relatively high value (~8.3 μΩ·cm/T) at 300 K due to its lower saturated magnetization. By analyzing the anomalous Hall resistivity scale with the longitudinal resistivity, it was also found that the anomalous Hall effect can be ascribed to the combined effect of extrinsic skew scattering and intrinsic Berry curvature, but the latter contribution plays a dominant role.

Keywords

• Heusler alloy
• half-metallic ferromagnetism
• anomalous Hall effect