A new type of half-metallic fully compensated ferrimagnet

S Semboshi; R Y Umetsu; Y Kawahito; H Akai

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-14561-8

A new type of half-metallic fully compensated ferrimagnet

Sci Rep. 2022 Jun 23;12(1):10687. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-14561-8.

Authors

S Semboshi¹, R Y Umetsu^{1

2

3}, Y Kawahito^{4

5}, H Akai⁶

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan.
² Center for Spintronics Research Network, Tohoku University, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan.
³ Center for Science and Innovation in Spintronics, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan.
⁴ Research Institute for Value-Added-Information Generation, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, 3173-25 Showa-machi, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 236-0001, Japan.
⁵ Department of Applied Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan.
⁶ The Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, Chiba, 277-8581, Japan. akai@cp.prec.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp.

Abstract

Half-metallic fully compensated ferrimagnets (HM-FCFMs) constitute a special class of half-metals exhibiting zero magnetization at zero temperature. While there have been a number of theoretical studies predicting the existence of such materials over the last 25 years, very few of those have been synthesized and observed that they exhibit expected properties. Herein, we demonstrate that a NiAs-type hexagonal-structured (CrFe)S compound could serve as an HM-FCFM material. It has a half-metallic nature of 100% spin-polarised Fermi surfaces and yet zero magnetisation at the ground state. The magnetisation shows linear behaviour as a function of the magnetic field at temperatures below the compensation temperature (~ 190 K). In addition, it shows a high magnetic coercivity of 3.8 T at 300 K. These magnetic features contribute to a significant development in the application of HM-FCFMs for spintronics devices.