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The structural, magnetic, and electron-transport properties of Heusler-ordered CoFeCrAl thin films are investigated experimentally and theoretically. The films, sputtered onto MgO and having thicknesses of about 100nm, exhibit virtually perfect single-crystalline epitaxy and a high degree of L21 chemical order. X-ray diffraction and transmission-electron microscopy show that the structure of the films is essentially of the L21 Heusler type. The films are ferrimagnetic, with a Curie temperature of about 390K, and a net moment of 2 μB per formula unit. The room temperature resistivity is 175 μΩ; the carrier concentration and mobility determined from the low temperature (5 K) measurement are 1.2 x 1018 cm-3 and 33 cm²/Vs, respectively. In contrast to the well-investigated Heusler alloys such as Co2(Cr1-xFex)Al, the CoFeCrAl system exhibits two main types of weak residual A2 disorder, namely, Co-Cr disorder and Fe-Cr disorder, the latter conserving half-metallicity. Point-contact Andreev reflection yields a lower bound for the spin polarization, 68% at 1.85K, but our structural and magnetization analyses suggest that the spin polarization at the Fermi level is probably higher than 90%. The high resistivity, spin polarization, and Curie temperature are encouraging in the context of spin electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural and electron-transport properties of thin films of the ferrimagnetic Heusler compound CoFeCrAl have been investigated to elucidate structure-property relationships. The alloy is, ideally, a spin-gapless semiconductor, but structural disorder destroys the spin-gapless character and drastically alters the transport behavior. Two types of CoFeCrAl films were grown by magnetron sputtering deposition at 973 K, namely polycrystalline films on Si substrates and epitaxial films on MgO (001) substrates. The resistivity decreases with increasing temperature, with relatively small temperature coefficients of -0.19 μΩcm/KμΩcm/K for the polycrystalline films and -0.12 μΩcm/KμΩcm/K for the epitaxial films. The residual resistivity of the polycrystalline films deposited on Si is higher than that of the epitaxial film deposited on MgO, indicating that the polycrystalline films behave as so-called dirty metals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]