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The progress in materials science has always been associated with the development of functional materials systems, which enables us to design proof-of-concept devices. To advance further, theoretical predictions of new novel materials and their experimental realization is very important. This chapter reviews the intriguing properties of rare earth-based materials and their applications in spintronics. Spintronics is an emerging technology, which exploits spin degree of freedom of an electron along with its charge property. Discovery of various physical phenomena and their industrial applications in the field of magnetic sensors, magnetic recording and non-volatile memories such as magnetic random access memory (MRAM) and spin-transfer torque (STT) MRAM opens several new directions in this field. Materials with large spin polarization, strong spin-orbit coupling, and tunable electronic and magnetic properties offer an excellent platform for the spintronics technology. Combination of rare earths with other elements such as transition metals show broad range of structural, electronic, and magnetic properties which make them excellent candidates for various spintronic applications. This chapter discusses many such materials ranging from Heusler alloys, topological insulators to two-dimensional ferromagnets and their potential applications. The review gives an insight of how rare-earth materials can play a key role in emerging future technology and have great potential in many new spintronic related applications., Comment: 55 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables

The chapter discusses the structural and magnetic properties of equiatomic ternary RTX compounds, where R represents rare earth, T is transition metal, and X belongs to the p block elements. RTX compounds exhibit a variety of crystal structures, which leads to a range of magnetic phenomenon ranging from long range antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic ordering, unconventional superconductivity, magnetic frustration to spin ices. Coexistence of various magnetic phenomenon result in many exotic properties, which make these materials promising for next generation technological applications. In RTX family of compounds, most transition metals, except manganese, Mn do not contribute significantly to the magnetic moment and behave as non-magnetic. The lack of magnetic behaviour in the transition metal sublattices of these ternary compounds may be attributed to hybridization between p electron states of X atom and d electron states of the transition metal, resulting in the filling of the d band. The dominant interaction in these compounds is of Ruderman Kittel Kasuya Yosida type due to the localized nature of the 4f electrons in the rare earths. The magnetic transition temperature in these materials varies from ultra-low to high temperatures, making them suitable for integration into devices operating at room temperature. The RTX series discussed here encompasses all rare earth elements, a range of transition metals, and various p-block elements such as Al, Ga, In, Si, Ge, Sn, Sb, and Bi. Most of the materials studied are arc melted polycrystalline materials with some in the form of single crystal or thin films., Comment: 102pages, 24 figures, 2 tables

We synthesize CoFeRuSn equiatomic quaternary Heusler alloy using arc-melt technique and investigate its structural, magnetic and transport properties. The room temperature powder X-ray diffraction analysis reveals that CoFeRuSn crystallizes in cubic crystal structure with small amount of DO3 - disorder. The field dependence of magnetization shows non-zero but small hysteresis and saturation behavior up to room temperature, indicating soft ferromagnetic nature of CoFeRuSn. The magnetic moment estimated from the magnetization data is found to be 4.15 {\mu}B / f.u., which is slightly less than the expected Slater-Pauling rule. The deviation in the value of experimentally observed moment from the theoretical value might be due to small disorder in the crystal. The low temperature fit to electrical resistivity data show absence of quadratic temperature dependence of resistivity, suggesting half-metallic behavior of CoFeRuSn. The high Curie temperature and possible half-metallic behavior of CoFeRuSn make it a highly promising candidate for room temperature spintronic applications., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

The continuous rise in CO2 emission into the environment is one of the most crucial issues facing the whole world. Many countries are making crucial decisions to control their carbon footprints to escape some of their catastrophic outcomes. There has been a lot of research going on to project the amount of carbon emissions in the future, which can help us to develop innovative techniques to deal with it in advance. Machine learning is one of the most advanced and efficient techniques for predicting the amount of carbon emissions from current data. This paper provides the methods for predicting carbon emissions (CO2 emissions) for the next few years. The predictions are based on data from the past 50 years. The dataset, which is used for making the prediction, is collected from World Bank datasets. This dataset contains CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) of all the countries from 1960 to 2018. Our method consists of using machine learning techniques to take the idea of what carbon emission measures will look like in the next ten years and project them onto the dataset taken from the World Bank's data repository. The purpose of this research is to compare how different machine learning models (Decision Tree, Linear Regression, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine) perform on a similar dataset and measure the difference between their predictions., Comment: Submitted to Annals of Data Science, 2022 - Springer

Brain tumor is the most common and deadliest disease that can be found in all age groups. Generally, MRI modality is adopted for identifying and diagnosing tumors by the radiologists. The correct identification of tumor regions and its type can aid to diagnose tumors with the followup treatment plans. However, for any radiologist analysing such scans is a complex and time-consuming task. Motivated by the deep learning based computer-aided-diagnosis systems, this paper proposes multi-task attention guided encoder-decoder network (MAG-Net) to classify and segment the brain tumor regions using MRI images. The MAG-Net is trained and evaluated on the Figshare dataset that includes coronal, axial, and sagittal views with 3 types of tumors meningioma, glioma, and pituitary tumor. With exhaustive experimental trials the model achieved promising results as compared to existing state-of-the-art models, while having least number of training parameters among other state-of-the-art models.

Two-dimensional MoS2 has emerged as promising material for nanoelectronics and spintronics due to its exotic properties. However, high contact resistance at metal semiconductor MoS2 interface still remains an open issue. Here, we report electronic properties of field effect transistor devices using monolayer MoS2 channels and permalloy (Py) as ferromagnetic (FM) metal contacts. Monolayer MoS2 channels were directly grown on SiO2/Si substrate via chemical vapor deposition technique. The increase in current with back gate voltage shows the tunability of FET characteristics. The Schottky barrier height (SBH) estimated for Py/MoS2 contacts is found to be +28.8 meV (zero-bias), which is the smallest value reported so-far for any direct metal (magnetic or non-magnetic)/monolayer MoS2 contact. With the application of gate voltage (+10 V), SBH shows a drastic reduction down to a value of -6.8 meV. The negative SBH reveals ohmic behavior of Py/MoS2 contacts. Low SBH with controlled ohmic nature of FM contacts is a primary requirement for MoS2 based spintronics and therefore using directly grown MoS2 channels in the present study can pave a path towards high performance devices for large scale applications., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 1 table and Supplementary Materials

We report on molecular beam epitaxy and properties of a magnetic topological insulator, Cr doped Sb2Te3. The composition analysis reveals that Cr replaces Sb site, and x-ray diffraction confirms that single phase textured crystal structure can be obtained for (CrxSb1-x)2Te3 with x up to 0.44. Further increase in x results in phase separation or precipitates in the material. The Curie temperature TC increases with x up to 0.44, and reaches to 250 K, which is the highest TC observed till now in magnetically doped topological insulators., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

We report the structural, magnetic and transport properties of polycrystalline CrVTiAl alloy along with first principles calculations. It crystallizes in the LiMgPdSn type structure with lattice parameter 6.14 \AA\ at room temperature. Absence of (111) peak along with the presence of a weak (200) peak indicates the antisite disorder of Al with Cr and V atoms. The magnetization measurements reveal a ferrimagnetic transition near 710 K and a coercive field of 100 Oe at 3 K. Very low moment and coercive field indicate fully compensated ferrimagnetism in the alloy. Temperature coefficient of resistivity is found to be negative, indicating a characteristic of semiconducting nature. Absence of exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature indicates a gapless/spin-gapless semiconducting behaviour. Electronic and magnetic properties of CrVTiAl for three possible crystallograpic configurations are studied theoretically. All the three configurations are found to be different forms of semiconductors. Ground state configuration is a fully compensated ferrimagnet with band gaps 0.58 eV and 0.30 eV for up and down spin bands respectively. The next higher energy configuration is also ferrimagnetic, but has spin-gapless semiconducting nature. The highest energy configuration corresponds to a non-magnetic gapless semiconductor. The energy differences among these configurations are quite small ($<$ 1 $\mathrm{mRy/atom}$) which hints that at finite temperatures, the alloy exists in a disordered phase, which is a mixture of the three configurations. By taking into account the theoretical and the experimental findings, we conclude that CrVTiAl is a fully compensated ferrimagnet with predominantly spin gap-less semiconductor nature., Comment: CrVTiAl, fully compensated ferrimagnet, semiconductor, spin gap-less, 7 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, Heusler alloys

We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of two quaternary Heusler alloys CoFeCrGe (CFCG) and CoMnCrAl (CMCA), promising candidates for spintronics applications. Magnetization measurement shows the saturation magnetization and transition temperature to be $3\; \mu_B$, $866$ K and $0.9 \; \mu_B$, $358$ K for CFCG and CMCA respectively. The magnetization values agree fairly well with our theoretical results and also obey the Slater-Pauling rule, a prerequisite for half metallicity. A striking difference between the two systems is their structure; CFCG crystallizes in fully ordered Y-type structure while CMCA has L2$_1$ disordered structure. The antisite disorder adds a somewhat unique property to the second compound, which arises due to the probabilistic mutual exchange of Al positions with Cr/Mn and such an effect is possibly expected due to comparable electronegativities of Al and Cr/Mn. {\it Ab-initio} simulation predicted a unique transition from half metallic ferromagnet to metallic antiferromagnet beyond a critical excess amount of Al in the alloy., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

RRhGe (R=Tb, Dy, Er, Tm) compounds have been studied by a number of experimental probes and theoretical ab initio calculations. These compounds show very interesting magnetic and electrical properties. All the compounds are antiferromagnetic with some of them showing spin-reorientation transition at low temperatures. The magnetocaloric effect (MCE) estimated from magnetization data shows very good value in all these compounds. The electrical resistivity shows metallic behavior of these compounds. MR shows negative sign near ordering temperatures and positive at low temperatures. The electronic structure calculations accounting for electronic correlations in the 4f rare-earth shell reveal the closeness of the antiferromagnetic ground state and other types of magnetic orderings in the rare-earth sublattice., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

We report experimental and theoretical studies of magnetic and related properties of ErRuSi compound. Various experimental techniques such as neutron diffraction, magnetization, magneto-thermal, magneto-transport, optical have been used to study the compound. Neutron diffraction shows ferromagnetic ordering at low temperatures with moments aligned in ab plane. Neutron diffraction and magnetization data show reduction in magnetic moment, which may be due to crystalline electric field effects at low temperatures. The compound shows good magnetocaloric properties with a low field adiabatic temperature change of 4.7 K, which is larger than that of many proposed materials for magnetic refrigeration at low temperatures. Magnetoresistance shows large negative value at 8 K, which changes its sign and increases in magnitude, with decrease in temperature and/or increase in field. The positive MR at low temperatures attributed to the Lorentz force effect. The electronic structure calculations accounting for electronic correlations of the 4f electrons of Er reproduces the ferromagnetic ordering and effective magnetic moment. Interband transitions between the Ru and Er d states and Er f states in one spin projection are found to form the main features of the measured optical conductivity in this compound., Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures

Polycrystalline HoSn1.1Ge0.9 and DySn1.1Ge0.9 compounds have been studied by means of different experimental probes. Both the compounds are antiferromagnetic and show metamagnetic transition at low temperatures. HoSn1.1Ge0.9 shows a sign change in magnetocaloric effect (MCE) and magnetoresistance (MR) with field, which is attributed to the metamagnetic transition. DySn1.1Ge0.9 shows characteristics of a typical antiferromagnet, as evidenced by magnetization, MCE and MR data. 119Sn M\"ossbauer studies show hyperfine splitting at low temperatures, consistent with magnetization data. Thermoelectric power and resistivity measurements reveal metallic behavior in these compounds. Magnetic, magnetocaloric and the magnetoresistance data clearly show that the antiferromagnetic coupling in DySn1.1Ge0.9 is stronger than in HoSn1.1Ge0.9., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures

Magnetic, magnetocaloric and magneto-transport properties of polycrystalline HoNiSi have been studied. The compound crystallizes in orthorhombic crystal structure and orders antiferromagnetically at TN=4.6 K. Magnetization isotherms show curvature at small fields, revealing a field induced metamagnetic transition. Magnetocalroic effect (MCE) has been estimated using magnetization data and is found to be 12.8 J/kg K for a field of 50 kOe. Application of field reduces the resistivity near TN, which results in a large negative MR. The maximum value of MR has been found to be -24% at 4 K for 50 kOe. Below 4 K, the compound shows positive MR with shape changing with field., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

RTX (R=rare earths, T= 3d/4d/5d, transition metals such as Sc, Ti, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Ru, Rh, Pd, Ag, Os, Ir, Pt, Au, and X=p-block elements such as Al, Ga, In, Si, Ge, Sn, As, Sb, Bi) series is a huge family of intermetallics compounds. These compounds crystallize in different crystal structures depending on the constituents. Though these compounds have been known for a long time, they came to limelight recently in view of the large magnetocaloric effect (MCE) and magnetoresistance (MR) shown by many of them. Most of these compounds crystallize in hexagonal and tetragonal crystal structures. Some of them show crystal structure modification with annealing temperature; while a few of them show iso-structural transition in the paramagnetic regime. Their magnetic ordering temperatures vary from very low temperatures to temperatures well above room temperature (~510 K). Depending on the crystal structure, they show a variety of magnetic and electrical properties. These compounds have been characterized by means of a variety of techniques/measurements such as x-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction, magnetic properties, heat capacity, magnetocaloric properties, electrical resistivity, magnetoresistance, thermoelectric power, thermal expansion, Hall effect, optical properties, XPS, M\"ossbauer spectroscopy, ESR, {\mu}SR, NMR, NQR etc. Some amount of work on theoretical calculations on electronic structure, crystal field interaction and exchange interactions has also been reported. The interesting aspect of this series is that they show a variety of physical properties such as Kondo effect, heavy fermion behavior, spin glass state, intermediate valence, superconductivity, multiple magnetic transitions, metamagnetism, large MCE, large positive as well as negative MR, spin orbital compensation, magnetic polaronic behavior, pseudo gap effect etc., Comment: J. Alloys and Compounds 2014 (Accepted) There may be minor change in the final version after Proof