# Electrical and magnetic properties of thin films of the spin-filter material CrVTiAl

## TL;DR

This study investigates the electrical and magnetic properties of thin films of CrVTiAl, a promising spin-filter material, revealing complex semiconducting behavior, high mobility differences, and various electronic phases through experiments and theoretical calculations.

## Contribution

It provides the first detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of CrVTiAl thin films' electronic structure and magnetic properties, highlighting multiple phases and their robustness.

## Key findings

- Resistivity shows two-channel semiconducting behavior.
- High mobility difference between gapless and gapped channels.
- Multiple electronic phases identified through calculations.

## Abstract

The spin-filter material CrVTiAl is a promising candidate for producing highly spin-polarized currents at room temperature in a nonmagnetic architecture. Thin films of compensated-ferrimagnetic CrVTiAl have been grown and their electrical and magnetic properties have been studied. The resistivity shows two-channel semiconducting behavior with one disordered gapless channel and a gapped channel with activation energy $\Delta E$=~0.1~-~0.2~eV. Magnetoresistance measurements to B~=~35~T provide values for the mobilities of the gapless channel, leading to an order of magnitude difference in the carrier effective masses, which are in reasonable accord with our density-functional-theory based results. The density of states and electronic band structure is computed for permutations of the four sublattices arranged differently along the (111) body diagonal, yielding metallic (Cr-V-Al-Ti), spin-gapless (Cr-V-Ti-Al) and spin-filtering (Cr-Ti-V-Al) phases. Robustness of the spin-gapless phase to substitutional disorder is also considered.