Heusler compound

Heusler compounds are magneticintermetallics with face-centered cubic or body-centered tetragonal crystal structure and a composition of XYZ (half-Heuslers) or X₂YZ (full-Heuslers), where X and Y are transition metals and Z is in the p-block. The term derives from the name of Germanmining engineer and chemistFriedrich Heusler, who studied such a compound (Cu₂MnAl) in 1903. Many of these compounds exhibit properties relevant to spintronics, such as magnetoresistance, variations of the Hall effect, ferro-, antiferro-, and ferrimagnetism, half- and semimetallicity, semiconductivity with spin filter ability, superconductivity, topological band structure and are actively studied as thermoelectric materials. Their magnetism results from a double-exchange mechanism between neighboring magnetic ions. Manganese, which sits at the body centers of the cubic structure, was the magnetic ion in the first Heusler compound discovered. (See the Bethe–Slater curve for details of why this happens.)