Uniaxial stress tuning of the anomalous Hall effect in Mn3Ge

TL;DR

This study investigates how uniaxial stress influences the anomalous Hall effect in Mn3Ge, revealing that stress along different axes alters magnetic order and electronic properties, with potential implications for spintronic device design.

Contribution

It demonstrates the tunability of the anomalous Hall effect in Mn3Ge through uniaxial stress, highlighting axis-dependent effects and magnetic order changes.

Findings

Stress along the a axis smooths the AHE jump at zero magnetic field.

Stress along the c axis has minimal effect on the AHE.

The c/a ratio varies linearly with strain, similar to hydrostatic pressure effects.

Abstract

Tunable electronic properties in magnetic materials lead to novel physical phenomena that have the potential to be exploited in the design of new spintronic devices. Here, we report the effect of uniaxial stress on the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in the hexagonal frustrated antiferromagnetic Heusler compound Mn3Ge. Our x-ray diffraction results show that the c/a ratio varies linearly with strain when stress is applied along the a axis, as well as a significantly higher Young's modulus along the c direction. The linear behavior of the c/a ratio under uniaxial stress mirrors that seen under hydrostatic pressure up to 1.8 GPa, but results in a characteristically different behavior of the AHE. Stress applied along the a axis induces a distortion in the ab plane, smoothing the abrupt jump in the AHE signal at zero magnetic field. In contrast, stress applied along the c axis has little effect, presumably due to the higher Young's modulus. We argue that this is due to pronounced changes in magnetic order.