Study of the Effect of Annealing on the Properties of Mn2RuxGa Thin Films

The effect of vacuum annealing thin films of the compensated ferrimagnetic half-metal Mn2RuxGa at temperatures from 250 degrees C to 400 degrees C is investigated. The 39.3 nm films deposited on (100) MgO substrates exhibit perpendicular magnetic anisotropy due to a small similar to 1% tetragonal elongation induced by the substrate strain. The main change on annealing is a modification in the compensation temperature T-comp, which first increases from 50 K for the as-deposited film to 185 K after annealing at 250 degrees C, and then falls to 140 K after annealing at 400 degrees C. There are minor changes in the atomic order, coercivity, resistivity, and anomalous Hall effect (AHE), but the net magnetization measured by SQUID magnetometry with the field applied in-plane or perpendicular-to-the-plane changes more significantly. It saturates at 20 - 30 kA . m(-1) at room temperature, and a small soft component is seen in the perpendicular SQUID loops, which is absent in the square AHE hysteresis loops. This is explained by the half-metallic nature of the compound; the AHE probes only the 4c Mn sublattice that provides the spin-polarized electrons at the Fermi level, whereas the SQUID measures the sum of the oppositely aligned 4c and 4a sublattice magnetizations.