No Arabic abstract
We report measurements of the magnetic, transport and thermal properties of the Heusler type compound Fe2VAl0.95. We show that while stoichiometric Fe2VAl is a non-magnetic semi-metal a 5% substitution on the Al-site with the 3d elements Fe and V atoms leads to a ferromagnetic ground state with a Curie temperature TC = 33+-3 K and a small ordered moment ms = 0.12 mB/Fe in Fe2VAl0.95. The reduced value of the ratio ms/mp = 0.08, where mp = 1.4 mB/Fe is the effective Curie-Weiss moment, together with the analysis of the magnetization data M(H,T), show magnetism is of itinerant nature. The specific heat shows an unusual temperature variation at low temperatures with an enhanced Sommerfeld coefficient, g = 12 mJK-2mol-1. The resistivity, r(T), is metallic and follows a power law behavior r(T) = r0+AT^n with n = 1.5 below TC. With applying pressure, TC decreases with the rate of (1/TC)(dTC /dP) = -0.061 GPa-1. We conclude substitution on the Al-site with Fe and V atoms results in itinerant ferromagnetism with a low carrier density.
Weak itinerant ferromagnetism in YCo9Si4 below about 25 K is studied by means of magnetisation, specific heat, and resistivity measurements. Single crystal X-ray Rietveld refinements at room temperature reveal a fully ordered distribution of Y, Co and Si atoms within the tetragonal space group I4/mcm isostructural with LaCo9Si4. The latter exhibits itinerant electron metamagnetism with an induced moment of about 1 mu_B/f.u. above 6 T, whereas YCo9Si4 exhibits a spontaneous magnetisation M0~12 Am^2/kg at 2 K which corresponds to an ordered moment of about 1.6 mu_B/f.u. indicating weak itinerant ferromagnetism.
Ultrathin films of the itinerant ferromagnet SrRuO$_3$ were studied using transport and magnto-optic polar Kerr effect. We find that below 4 monolayers the films become insulating and their magnetic character changes as they loose their simple ferromagnetic behavior. We observe a strong reduction in the magnetic moment which for 3 monolayers and below lies in the plane of the film. Exchange-bias behavior is observed below the critical thickness, and may point to induced antiferromagnetism in contact with ferromagnetic regions.
The physics of weak itinerant ferromagnets is challenging due to their small magnetic moments and the ambiguous role of local interactions governing their electronic properties, many of which violate Fermi liquid theory. While magnetic fluctuations play an important role in the materials unusual electronic states, the nature of these fluctuations and the paradigms through which they arise remain debated. Here we use inelastic neutron scattering to study magnetic fluctuations in the canonical weak itinerant ferromagnet MnSi. Data reveal that short-wavelength magnons continue to propagate until a mode crossing predicted for strongly interacting quasiparticles is reached, and the local susceptibility peaks at a coherence energy predicted for a correlated Hund metal by first-principles many-body theory. Scattering between electrons and orbital and spin fluctuations in MnSi can be understood at the local level to generate non-Fermi liquid character. These results provide crucial insight into the role of interorbital Hunds exchange within the broader class of enigmatic multiband itinerant, weak ferromagnets.
We study the electronic structure of the Pd-terminated surface of the non-magnetic delafossite oxide metal PdCoO$_2$. Combining angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density-functional theory, we show how an electronic reconstruction driven by surface polarity mediates a Stoner-like magnetic instability towards itinerant surface ferromagnetism. Our results reveal how this leads to a rich multi-band surface electronic structure, and provide spectroscopic evidence for an intriguing sample-dependent coupling of the surface electrons to a bosonic mode which we attribute to electron-magnon interactions. Moreover, we find similar surface state dispersions in PdCrO$_2$, suggesting surface ferromagnetism persists in this sister compound despite its bulk antiferromagnetic order.
We propose an experiment to explore the magnetic phase transitions in interacting fermionic Hubbard systems, and describe how to obtain the ferromagnetic phase diagram of itinerant electron systems from these observations. In addition signatures of ferromagnetic correlations in the observed ground states are found: for large trap radii (trap radius $R_T > 4$, in units of coherence length $xi$), ground states are topological in nature -- a skyrmion in 2D, and a hedgehog in 3D.