The evolution of elastic properties with temperature and magnetic field was studied in two differently heat-treated single crystals of the Ni-Mn-Ga magnetic shape memory alloy using resonant ultrasound spectroscopy. Quenching and slow furnace cooling were used to obtain different densities of antiphase boundaries. We found that the crystals exhibited pronounced differences in the c' elastic coefficient and related shear damping in high-temperature ferromagnetic phases (austenite and premartensite). The difference can be ascribed to the formation of fine magnetic domain patterns and pinning of the magnetic domain walls on antiphase boundaries in the material with a high density of antiphase boundaries due to quenching. The fine domain pattern arising from mutual interactions between antiphase boundaries and ferromagnetic domain walls effectively reduces the magnetocrystalline anisotropy and amplifies the contribution of magnetostriction to the elastic response of the material. As a result, the anomalous elastic softening prior to martensite transformation is significantly enhanced in the quenched sample. Thus, for any comparison of experimental data and theoretical calculations the microstructural changes induced by specific heat treatment must be taken into account.

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Resonant ultrasound spectroscopy measurements and density functional theory calculations were used to analyze the effect of Co and Cu doping (3-6 at. %) on elastic constants of non-modulated martensite of the Ni-Mn-Ga ferromagnetic shape memory alloy. Due to the doping, the studied alloys exhibited decreased tetragonal ratios c/a≈1.14. Both the experiments and the calculations revealed that the lowering of the c/a ratio resulted in a change of the orientation of the softest shearing modes of the tetragonal lattice. The newly appearing softest shearing modes for the doped materials have approximatelyorientations and indicate a lattice instability directly related to the particularly low twinning stress for compound á ñ 101 101 { } ¯twins, needed for the magnetically induced reorientation.