Heusler Alloy Lab Report

Synthesis and Characterization of Iron, Manganese and Tin Based Heusler Alloy Nanowires

Ashwin Suresh

Department of Physics & Nanotechnology, SRM University –Chennai, India

ABSTRCT

The ability of Heusler alloys to show half metallicity at room temperature has made them a widely researched topic in the field of Spintronics. I present here the synthesis of nanowires of an alloy of Iron, manganese, and tin by electrospinning technique. The morphology of the nanowires was identified by Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy and crystalline size by X-Ray Diffraction analysis and elemental analysis by Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analysis. The morphologies tend to vary with changes in parameters like electrospinning voltage and annealing temperature. The material also shows good resistive properties.

Key Words: Heusler alloys, Spintronics, nanowires, electrospinning, Scanning Electron Microscopy.

INTRODUCTION

Heusler alloys are based on heusler phase with high Curie temperature, which are intermetallics with particular composition and face-centered cubic crystal structure. They are mainly ferromagnetic but some of the combination for the alloy show antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic properties. The property of double exchange

Initially the concentration of the polymer was set at 15wt%, but the viscosity was very high which made the electrospinning voltage to be very high at 25KV. Then the concentration of the polymer solution was reduced to 9wt% then to 7.4wt%, the viscosity of the polymer solution was made optimum and approximately 0.25 gm of chlorides of iron, manganese and tin were then added to the polymer solution. The electrospinning voltage reduced accordingly with respect to the concentration of the solution. Fig. 1: Graph depicting polymer solution wt% vs electrospinning