Near total magnetic moment compensation with high Curie temperature in Mn<inf>2</inf>V<inf>0.5</inf>Co<inf>0.5</inf>Z (Z = Ga,Al) Heusler alloys

Mn2V1-xCoxZ (Z = Ga,Al and x = 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1) Heusler alloys have been synthesized to investigate the effect of Co substitution at the V site on the magnetic moment and Curie temperature of half-metallic ferrimagnets Mn2VGa and Mn2VAl. Near total magnetic moment compensation was achieved with high Curie temperature for x = 0.5 composition. The Co substituted alloys show a non linear decrease in lattice parameter without altering the crystal structure of the parent alloys. The end members Mn2VGa and Mn2CoGa have the saturation magnetization of 1.80 μ B/f.u. and 2.05 μ B/f.u. respectively whereas for the Mn2V0.5Co0.5Ga alloy, a near total magnetic moment compensation (0.10 μ B/f.u.) was observed due to the ferrimagnetic coupling of Mn with parallelly aligned V and Co. The Co substituted Mn2VAl has also shown a similar trend with compensated magnetic moment value of 0.06 μ B/f.u. for x = 0.5. The Curie temperatures of the alloys including the x = 0.5 composition are well above the room temperature (more than 650 K) which is in sharp contrast to the earlier reported values of 171 K for the (MnCo)VGa and 105 K for the (MnCo)VAl (substitution at the Mn site). The observed T C values are highest among the Mn2V based fully compensated ferrimagnets. The magnetic moment compensation without significant reduction in T C indicates that the V site substitution of Co does not weaken the magnetic interaction in Mn2VZ (Z = Ga,Al) alloys which is contrary to the earlier experimental reports on Mn site substitution.