Half-metallic ferrimagnet formed by substituting Fe for Mn in semiconductor MnTe

摘要

A ternary ferrimagnetic half-metal, constructed through sub-stituting 25% Fe for Mn in zincblende semiconductor MnTe,is predicted in terms of accurate first-principles calculations.It has a large half-metallic (HM) gap of 0.54 eV and its ferri-magnetic order is very stable against other magnetic fluctua-tions. The HM ferrimagnetism is formed because the corn-plete moment compensation in the antiferromagnetic MnTe isreplaced by an incomplete one in the Fe-substituted MnTe.This should make a novel approach to new HM materials.The half-metal could be fabricated because Fe has good affin-ity with Mn, and is useful for spintronics.