No Arabic abstract
Spin freezing in the $A$-site spinel FeAl$_2$O$_4$ which is a spin liquid candidate is studied using remnant magnetization and nonlinear magnetic susceptibility and isofield cooling and heating protocols. The remnant magnetization behavior of FeAl$_2$O$_4$ differs significantly from that of a canonical spin glass which is also supported by analysis of the nonlinear magnetic susceptibility term $chi_3 (T)$. Through the power-law analysis of $chi_3 (T)$, a spin-freezing temperature, $T_g$ = 11.4$pm$0.9~K and critical exponent, $gamma$ = 1.48$pm$0.59 are obtained. Cole-Cole analysis of magnetic susceptibility shows the presence of broad spin relaxation times in FeAl$_2$O$_4$, however, the irreversible dc susceptibility plot discourages an interpretation based on conventional spin glass features. The magnetization measured using the cooling-and-heating-in-unequal-fields protocol brings more insight to the magnetic nature of this frustrated magnet and reveals unconventional glassy behaviour. Combining our results, we arrive at the conclusion that the present sample of FeAl$_2$O$_4$ consists of a majority spin liquid phase with glassy regions embedded.
In this work it is studied the Hopfield fermionic spin glass model which allows interpolating from trivial randomness to a highly frustrated regime. Therefore, it is possible to investigate whether or not frustration is an essential ingredient which would allow this magnetic disordered model to present naturally inverse freezing by comparing the two limits, trivial randomness and highly frustrated regime and how different levels of frustration could affect such unconventional phase transition. The problem is expressed in the path integral formalism where the spin operators are represented by bilinear combinations of Grassmann variables. The Grand Canonical Potential is obtained within the static approximation and one-step replica symmetry breaking scheme. As a result, phase diagrams temperature {it versus} the chemical potential are obtained for several levels of frustration. Particularly, when the level of frustration is diminished, the reentrance related to the inverse freezing is gradually suppressed.
A relation between the freezing temperature ($T^{}_{rm g}$) and the exchange couplings ($J^{}_{ij}$) in metallic spin-glasses is derived, taking the spin-correlations ($G^{}_{ij}$) into account. This approach does not involve a disorder-average. The expansion of the correlations to first order in $J^{}_{ij}/T^{}_{rm g}$ leads to the molecular-field result from Thouless-Anderson-Palmer. Employing the current theory of the spin-interaction in disordered metals, an equation for $T^{}_{rm g}$ as a function of the concentration of impurities is obtained, which reproduces the available data from {sl Au}Fe, {sl Ag}Mn, and {sl Cu}Mn alloys well.
Neutron scattering experiments on a polycrystalline sample of the frustrated pyrochlore magnet Tb2Ti2O7, which does not show any magnetic order down to 50 mK, have revealed that it shows condensation behavior below 0.4 K from a thermally fluctuating paramagnetic state to a spin-liquid ground-state with quantum spin fluctuations. Energy spectra change from quasielastic scattering to a continuum with a double-peak structure at energies of 0 and 0.8 K in the spin-liquid state. Specific heat shows an anomaly at the crossover temperature.
We report on the crossover from the thermal to athermal regime of an artificial spin ice formed from a square array of magnetic islands whose lateral size, 30~nm~$times$~70~nm, is small enough that they are superparamagnetic at room temperature. We used resonant magnetic soft x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) as a method to observe the time-time correlations of the fluctuating magnetic configurations of spin ice during cooling, which are found to slow abruptly as a freezing temperature $T_0 = 178 pm 5$~K is approached. This slowing is well-described by a Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann law, implying that the frozen state is glassy, with the freezing temperature being commensurate with the strength of magnetostatic interaction energies in the array. The activation temperature, $T_mathrm{A} = 40 pm 10$~K, is much less than that expected from a Stoner-Wohlfarth coherent rotation model. Zero-field-cooled/field-cooled magnetometry reveals a freeing up of fluctuations of states within islands above this temperature, caused by variation in the local anisotropy axes at the oxidised edges. This Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann behavior implies that the system enters a glassy state on freezing, which is unexpected for a system with a well-defined ground state.
In conventional spin glasses, the magnetic interaction is not strongly anisotropic and the entire spin system freezes at low temperature. In La2(Cu,Li)O4, for which the in-plane exchange interaction dominates the interplane one, only a fraction of spins with antiferromagnetic correlations extending to neighboring planes become spin-glass. The remaining spins with only in-plane antiferromagnetic correlations remain spin-liquid at low temperature. Such a novel partial spin freezing out of a spin-liquid observed in this cold neutron scattering study is likely due to a delicate balance between disorder and quantum fluctuations in the quasi-two dimensional S=1/2 Heisenberg system.