Temperature-dependent evolution of the electronic structure in EuZn <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi/> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml

Abstract

Magnetoresistive materials have been tremendously important for the development of magnetic memory storage and spintronic devices. Recently, the antiferromagnetic EuX2Pn2 compounds, with X being a transition metal and Pn being a pnictogen, have seen intensive research interest due to their unusual anomalous Hall effect behavior and pronounced resistive anomaly near the Neel temperature (TN). These magnetotransport phenomena have been interpreted in the context of shortranged ferromagnetic Structuations, magnetic polaron formation, canted spin configurations, and temperature dependent metal insulator transitions in the electronic structure. Here, we report the observation of such a pronounced resistivity anomaly in EuZn2As2 near TN = 19 K. We demonstrate the suppression of this anomaly using applied magnetic fields, both in plane and out of plane. To further interpret the origin of the observed transport behavior, we studied the temperature dependent electronic structure using combined angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and first principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which exhibits limited modifications to the bands across TN away from the Fermi energy. This lack of involvement of the electronic structure indicates a spin-scattering origin of the aforementioned transport properties, rather than a reconstruction of the Fermi surface.