Phase dynamics, structural, and magnetic properties of a Mn2.6Ga1−xSnx alloy series

Although Mn-Ga alloys are discussed as novel permanent magnetic materials, there are several drawbacks, including the high price of Ga and the yet too small saturation magnetization to name a few. We used several guidelines to motivate the replacement of Ga by Sn to tackle these issues and explored the phase formation, structural and magnetic properties of a Mn2.6Ga1−xSnx alloy series. The structure of Sn-rich samples is dominated by the corresponding hexagonal and orthorhombic phases, while the structure of Ga-rich samples shows additional contributions from the tetragonal DO22 structure. However, formation of the tetragonal phase happens only upon an appropriate annealing procedure. In contrast to the discussion in the literature, our experiments do not hint on the tetragonal DO22 structure being metastable, but rather indicate the DO22 structure being an equilibrium phase. In general, the experimentally found phase fractions impact on the magnetic properties and hard magnetic properties are downgraded very rapidly even if only a small amount of Ga is substituted by Sn. This indicates that the DO22 phase found only in the Ga-rich samples is indeed the one which is most relevant for realization of high magnetic anisotropy.