Revelation of the role of impurities and conduction electron density in the high resolution photoemission study of ferromagnetic hexaborides

Abstract

We investigate the temperature evolution of the electronic structure of ferromagnetic CaB$_6$ using ultra-high resolution photoemission spectroscopy; electronic structure of paramagnetic LaB$_6$ is used as a reference. High resolution spectra of CaB$_6$ reveal finite density of states at the Fermi level, $\epsilon_F$ at all the temperatures and evidence of impurity induced localized features in the vicinity of $\epsilon_F$, which are absent in the spectra of LaB$_6$. Analysis of the high resolution spectra suggests that disorder in B-sublattice inducing partial localization in the mobile electrons and low electron density at $\epsilon_F$ is important to achieve ferromagnetism in these systems.