Temperature-dependent magnetoresistance of pure aluminum and dilute Al-Ga and Al-Mg alloys

Abstract
We have measured the resistance of very pure polycrystalline aluminum wires (resistance ratio ∼2000) and dilute Al-Ga and Al-Mg alloys in zero field and transverse magnetic fields up to 50 kG for temperatures between 4.2 and 100 K. For all of our samples at low fields, the magnetoresistance, Δρρ0, decreases monotonically with temperature and Kohler's rule is observed. At high fields, however, departures from Kohler's rule are observed. For the pure aluminum samples and with H>10 kG, Δρρ0 first increases with temperature, reaches a maximum at 20-25 K, then deceases monotonically with temperature. The temperature at which the maximum in Δρρ0 occurs increases with increasing field from about 20 K at H=10 kG to about 25 K at H=50 kG. Also, with increasing field the departures from Kohler's rule become more pronounced. Although greatly reduced, similar departures from Kohler's rule are also observed in Al-Ga samples, and to an even lesser extent in Al-Mg samples. We find that our results can be understood in terms of a simple "two-band" model assuming the resistivity of the ith band is of the form ai+biTxi and the total conductivity is the sum of the conductivities from each band.

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