No Arabic abstract
Neutron diffraction measurements were carried out on single crystals and powders of Yb2Pt2Pb, where Yb moments form planes of orthogonal dimers in the frustrated Shastry-Sutherland Lattice (SSL). Yb2Pt2Pb orders antiferromagnetically at TN=2.07 K, and the magnetic structure determined from these measurements features the interleaving of two orthogonal sublattices into a 5*5*1 magnetic supercell that is based on stripes with moments perpendicular to the dimer bonds, which are along (110) and (-110). Magnetic fields applied along (110) or (-110) suppress the antiferromagnetic peaks from an individual sublattice, but leave the orthogonal sublattice unaffected, evidence for the Ising character of the Yb moments in Yb2Pt2Pb. Specific heat, magnetic susceptibility, and electrical resistivity measurements concur with neutron elastic scattering results that the longitudinal critical fluctuations are gapped with E about 0.07 meV.
We investigate the physical properties of the Shastry-Sutherland lattice material BaNd$_2$ZnO$_5$. Neutron diffraction, magnetic susceptibility, and specific heat measurements reveal antiferromagnetic order below 1.65 K. The magnetic order is found to be a 2-$boldsymbol{Q}$ magnetic structure with the magnetic moments lying in the Shastry-Sutherland lattice planes comprising the tetragonal crystal structure of BaNd$_2$ZnO$_5$. The ordered moment for this structure is 1.9(1) $mu_B$ per Nd ion. Inelastic neutron scattering measurements reveal that the crystal field ground state doublet is well separated from the first excited state at 8 meV. The crystal field Hamiltonian is determined through simultaneous refinement of models with both the LS coupling and intermediate coupling approximations to the inelastic neutron scattering and magnetic susceptibility data. The ground state doublet indicates that the magnetic moments lie primarily in the basal plane with magnitude consistent with the size of the determined ordered moment.
We investigate classical Heisenberg spins on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice and under an external magnetic field. A detailed study is carried out both analytically and numerically by means of classical Monte-Carlo simulations. Magnetization pseudo-plateaux are observed around 1/3 of the saturation magnetization for a range of values of the magnetic couplings. We show that the existence of the pseudo-plateau is due to an entropic selection of a particular collinear state. A phase diagram that shows the domains of existence of those pseudo-plateaux in the $(h, T)$ plane is obtained.
We use the non-perturbative Contractor-Renormalization method (CORE) in order to derive an effective model for triplet excitations on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice. For strong enough magnetic fields, various magnetization plateaux are observed, e.g. at 1/8, 1/4, 1/3 of the saturation, as found experimentally in a related compound. Moreover, other stable plateaux are found at 1/9, 1/6 or 2/9. We give a critical review of previous works and try to resolve some apparent inconsistencies between various theoretical approaches.
In the presence of a magnetic field frustrated spin systems may exhibit plateaus at fractional values of saturation magnetization. Such plateau states are stabilized by classical and quantum mechanisms including order-by-disorder, triplon crystallization, and various competing order effects. In the case of electrically conducting systems, free electrons represent an incisive probe for the plateau states. Here we study the electrical transport of Ising-type rare earth tetraborides $R$B$_4$ ($R=$Er, Tm), a metallic Shastry-Sutherland lattice showing magnetization plateaus. We find that the longitudinal and transverse resistivities reflect scattering with both the static and dynamic plateau structure. We model these results consistently with the expected strong uniaxial anisotropy in a quantitative level, providing a framework for the study of plateau states in metallic frustrated systems.
We studied the electronic structure of a Shastry-Sutherland lattice system, HoB4 employing high resolution photoemission spectroscopy and ab initio band structure calculations. The surface and bulk borons exhibit subtle differences, and loss of boron compared to the stoichiometric bulk. However, the surface and bulk conduction bands near Fermi level are found to be similar. Evolution of the electronic structure with temperature is found to be similar to that observed in a typical charge-disordered system. A sharp dip is observed at the Fermi level in the low temperature spectra revealing signature of antiferromagnetic gap. Asymmetric spectral weight transfer with temperature manifests particle-hole asymmetry that may be related to the exotic properties of these systems.