Electric and Magnetic Properties of bcc Fe Based Multicomponent Alloys

The electrical and magnetic properties of a bcc Fe 1- x A x , system with the average atom formed by A = (Al, Si, V, Cr) are presented. Compositions were chosen to obtain alloys of simple structure with control parameter ( x ) covering some important Heusler alloys. Systematic changes in the residual resistivity, magnetic moments, and electronic structure with concentration x are observed. The so-called parallel-resistivity formula ρ -1 =ρ ideal -1 +ρ sat -1 was used for quantitative characterization of the concentrated alloys, where ρ ideal denotes a contribution resulting from different mechanisms of scattering and ρ sat represents a shunt resistivity. At small concentrations x , the main contribution comes from structural disorder. It is shown that the density of states at the Fermi level is substantially reduced at larger x in agreement with results of electronic structure calculations.