Structural ordering driven anisotropic magnetoresistance, anomalous Hall resistance and its topological overtones in full-Heusler Co2MnSi thin films

We report the evolution of crystallographic structure, magnetic ordering and electronic transport in thin films of full-Heusler alloy Co$_2$MnSi deposited on (001) MgO with annealing temperatures ($T_A$). By increasing the $T_A$ from 300$^\circ$C to 600$^\circ$C, the film goes from a disordered nanocrystalline phase to $B2$ ordered and finally to the $L2_1$ ordered alloy. The saturation magnetic moment improves with structural ordering and approaches the Slater-Pauling value of $\approx 5.0 \mu_B$ per formula unit for $T_A$ = 600$^\circ$C. At this stage the films are soft magnets with coercive and saturation fields as low as $\approx$ 7 mT and 350 mT, respectively. Remarkable effects of improved structural order are also seen in longitudinal resistivity ($\rho_{xx}$) and residual resistivity ratio. A model based upon electronic transparency of grain boundaries illucidates the transition from a state of negative $d\rho/dT$ to positive $d\rho/dT$ with improved structural order. The Hall resistivity ($\rho_{xy}$) derives contribution from the normal scattering of charge carriers in external magnetic field, the anomalous effect originating from built-in magnetization and a small but distinct topological Hall effect in the disordered phase. The carrier concentration ($n$) and mobility ($\mu$) have been extracted from the high field $\rho_{xy}$ data. The highly ordered films are characterized by $n$ and $\mu$ of 1.19$\times$ 10$^{29}$ m$^{-3}$ and 0.4 cm$^2V^{-1}s^{-1}$ at room temperature. The dependence of $\rho_{xy}$ on $\rho_{xx}$ indicates the dominance of skew scattering in our films, which shows a monotonic drop on raising the $T_A$. The topological Hall effect is analyzed for the films annealed at 300$^\circ$C. ......Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl

Comparison of CSMA based MAC protocols of wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation has been an important area of interest in Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs). Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in energy conservation. In this paper, we describe CSMA based MAC protocols for WSN and analyze the simulation results of these protocols. We implemented S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, B-MAC+, X-MAC, DMAC and Wise-MAC in TOSSIM, a simulator which unlike other simulators simulates the same code running on real hardware. Previous surveys mainly focused on the classification of MAC protocols according to the techniques being used or problem dealt with and presented a theoretical evaluation of protocols. This paper presents the comparative study of CSMA based protocols for WSNs, showing which MAC protocol is suitable in a particular environment and supports the arguments with the simulation results. The comparative study can be used to find the best suited MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks in different environments.Comment: International Journal of AdHoc Network Systems, Volume 2, Number 2, April 201