Slater-Pauling Behavior in Half-Metallic Heusler Compounds

Heusler materials have become very popular over the last two decades due to the half-metallic properties of a large number of Heusler compounds. The latter are magnets that present a metallic behavior for the spin-up and a semiconducting behavior for the spin-down electronic band structure leading to a variety of spintronic applications, and Slater-Pauling rules have played a major role in the development of this research field. These rules have been derived using ab initio electronic structure calculations and directly connecting the electronic properties (existence of spin-down energy gap) to the magnetic properties (total spin magnetic moment). Their exact formulation depends on the half-metallic family under study and can be derived if the hybridization of the orbitals at various sites is taken into account. In this review, the origin and formulation of the Slater-Pauling rules for various families of Heusler compounds, derived during these two last decades, is presented.