Session H30 - Kondo and Correlated Electron Materials.
ORAL session, Tuesday morning, March 04
Room 18D, Austin Convention Center
LaSb2 has recently been found to have unusual magnetoresistive properties despite the fact that neither La nor Sb are magnetic. We report a characterization of the electronic structure of LaSb2 using core-level photoabsorption, ultraviolet photoemission (UPS) and Auger electron spectroscopy. Single crystals of LaSb2 were grown from high purity La and Sb by metallic flux method. LaSb2 forms a SmSb2 orthorhombic structure, and is highly anisotropic, with alternating layers of La and Sb, and two-dimensional rectangular sheets of Sb atoms stacked along the c axis. We compare spectra taken after using two cleaning methods: sputtering followed by annealing, and scraping followed by annealing. UPS has been performed on LaSb2 to study the electronic band structure near the Fermi level and provide clues to the Fermi surface topology. These results will be compared to first principles band structure calculations.
Research was performed at Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD).