Ferromagnetic resonance and magnetic damping in C-doped Mn5Ge3

Ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) was used to investigate the static and dynamic magnetic properties of carbon-doped Mn5Ge3 thin films grown on Ge(1 1 1). The temperature dependence of magnetic anisotropy shows an increased perpendicular magneto-crystalline contribution at 80 K with an in-plane easy axis due to the large shape contribution. We find that our samples show a small FMR linewidth (corresponding to an intrinsic magnetic damping parameter ) which is a measure of the spin relaxation and directly related with the magnetic and structural quality of the material. In the perpendicular-to-plane geometry, the FMR linewidth shows a minimum at around 200 K for all the samples, which seems to be not correlated to the C-doping. The magnetic relaxation parameters have been determined and indicate the two-magnon scattering as the main extrinsic contribution. We observe a change in the main contribution from scattering centres in Mn5 Ge3C0.2 at low temperatures, which could be related to the minimum in linewidth.