Physical Properties of Intermetallic FE2VA1

Fe2VAl has recently been discovered to have a negative temperature coefficient of resistivity, moderately enhanced specific heat coefficient, and a large DOS at the Fermi level by photoemission. This triggered a round of heated research to understand the ground state of this material, both theoretically and experimentally. here they report a comprehensive characterization of Fe2VAl. X-ray diffraction exhibited appreciable antisite disorder in all of our samples. FTIR spectroscopy measurements showed that the carrier density and scattering time had little sample-to-sample variation or temperature dependence for near-stoichiometric samples. FTIR and DC resistivity suggest that the transport properties of Fe2VAl are influenced by both localized and delocalized carriers, with the former primarily responsible for the negative temperature coefficient of resistivity. Magnetization measurements reveal that near-stoichiometric samples have superparamagnetic clusters with at least two sizes of moments. X-ray photoemission from Fe core level showed localized magnetic moments on site-exchanged Fe. They conclude that in Fe2VAl, antisite disorder causes significant modification to the semi-metallic band structure proposed by LDA calculations. With antisite disorder considered, they are now able to explain most of the physical properties of Fe2VAl