Regulating the Performance of MnBi Magnetic Materials by Sb Doping: DFT Calculations and Experiments

Abstract

The use of dopants to regulate ferromagnetism in the rare-earth-free MnBi magnetic materials is one of the fundamental approaches to change the electronic structure and interactions inside the unit cell leading to the ability of controlling magnetic properties of materials. This work deals with doping Sb element into the MnBi system. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed the close dependences between the system’s energy, lattice parameters, magnetization, coercivity and the Sb doping amount. The calculated results, supported by the experimental results, show the usefulness of Sb in regulating the magnetic performance of MnBi materials.