Anomalous Hall effect in stoichiometric Heusler alloys with native disorder: A first-principles study

J. Kudrnovský, V. Drchal, and I. Turek

Phys. Rev. B 88, 014422 – Published 19 July 2013

Abstract

We estimate the anomalous Hall effect of selected Heusler alloys from first principles. An emphasis is put on the effect of the native disorder which is often present in the stoichiometric samples. Such disorder can strongly influence both the magnetic and transport properties of these alloys. We employ a recently developed fully relativistic Kubo-Středa approach adapted to disordered multisublattice systems in which the chemical disorder is described in terms of the coherent potential approximation. As case studies we choose half-metallic Heusler alloys Co $_{2}$ CrAl and Co $_{2}$ MnAl, as well as the spin gapless semiconductor alloy Mn $_{2}$ CoAl for which experimental and theoretical studies appeared recently. We demonstrate that proper inclusion of disorder significantly improves agreement between the experiment and theory.