Modified Becke-Johnson potential investigation of half-metallic Heusler compounds

Abstract

We have investigated the electronic structures of various potentially half-metallic Heusler compounds with the Tran-Blaha modified Becke-Johnson (TB-mBJLDA) potential within the density functional theory. The half-metallic gaps are considerably enhanced with respect to values from the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) functional. In particular the unoccupied densities of states are modified by mBJLDA, and agreement with experiment is considerably worse than for PBE. The agreement of the densities of states can be improved by reducing the Tran-Blaha parameter c. However, ground state properties such as the hyperfine fields are more accurately described by PBE than by mBJLDA. Despite its success for ionic and covalent semiconductors and insulators, we conclude that mBJLDA is not a suitable approximation for half-metallic Heusler compounds.