Emergence of asymmetric skew-scattering dominated anomalous Nernst effect in the spin gapless semiconductors Co1+xFe1−xCrGa

Abstract

Heusler alloy-based spin gapless semiconductors (SGSs) with very high Curie temperatures $({T}_{C})$ have recently gained enormous attention because of their unconventional electronic structures. They exhibit a nonzero band gap in one of the spin channels and a zero band gap in the other spin channel, making them an important class of materials for tunable spin transport. Here, we report the experimental observation of anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) in ${\mathrm{Co}}_{1+x}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}\mathrm{CrGa}$ ($x=0$, 0.2, 0.4, and 0.5), which are the emerging quaternary Heusler alloy-based SGSs. While the electron-electron elastic scattering and the disorder-mediated weak localization effect play the major roles in electrical transport for all the samples at low temperatures, the magnon-drag effect was found to dominate the longitudinal thermoelectric transport. The ANE coefficient at room temperature increases from $\ensuremath{\approx}0.018\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{V}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{K}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ for $x=0$ to $\ensuremath{\approx}0.063\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{V}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{K}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ for $x=0.5$, which is higher than that for ${\mathrm{Ni}}_{81}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{19}$ and compressively strained $\mathrm{SrRu}{\mathrm{O}}_{3}$ films. Our analysis indicates that the observed ANE in these samples originates from asymmetric skew scattering of charge carriers.