Semicon ducting high-temperature magnets? Available to Purchase

In recent years, calcium hexaboride (CaB₆) doped with lanthanum has puzzled magnetism researchers, in large part because it retains a modest ferromagnetism even at 900 K—a surprisingly high Curie temperature for a compound that does not contain traditional magnetic metals such as nickel or iron. Electronic structure calculations based on density functional theory led to several possible explanations: CaB₆ might be a semimetal or an excitonic insulator; doped CaB₆ might be a doped excitonic insulator, a conventional magnetic material, or even an example of the long-sought, low-density spin-polarized electron gas. Now, however, physicists in the Netherlands have performed more accurate calculations, using the so-called GW approximation, which suggest that CaB₆ is actually a semiconductor with a bandgap of 0.8 eV. If that is true, important applications await the compound in the field of spintronics, in which an electron’s spin and not just its charge carries...