No Arabic abstract
Reentrant spin glasses are frustrated disordered ferromagnets developing vortex-like textures under an applied magnetic field. Our study of a Ni$_{0.81}$Mn$_{0.19}$ single crystal by small angle neutron scattering clarifies their internal structure and shows that these textures are randomly distributed. Spin components transverse to the magnetic field rotate over length scales of 3-15 nm in the explored field range, decreasing as field increases according to a scaling law. Monte-Carlo simulations reveal that the internal structure of the vortices is strongly distorted and differs from that assumed for frustrated skyrmions, built upon a competition between symmetric exchange interactions. Isolated vortices have small non-integer topological charge. The vortices keep an anisotropic shape on a 3 dimensional lattice, recalling croutons in a ferromagnetic soup. Their size and number can be tuned independently by the magnetic field and concentration x (or heat treatment), respectively. This opens an original route to understand and control the influence of quenched disorder in systems hosting non trivial spin textures.
We propose a method to study the magnetic properties of a disordered Ising kagome lattice. The model considers small spin clusters with infinite-range disordered couplings and short-range ferromagnetic (FE) or antiferromagnetic interactions. The correlated cluster mean-field theory is used to obtain an effective single-cluster problem. A finite disorder intensity in FE kagome lattice introduces a cluster spin-glass (CSG) phase. Nevertheless, an infinitesimal disorder stabilizes the CSG behavior in the geometrically frustrated kagome system. Entropy, magnetic susceptibility and spin-spin correlation are used to describe the interplay between disorder and geometric frustration (GF). We find that GF plays an important role in the low-disorder CSG phase. However, the increase of disorder can rule out the effect of GF.
We show theoretically that spin and orbital degrees of freedom in the pyrochlore oxide Y2Mo2O7, which is free of quenched disorder, can exhibit a simultaneous glass transition, working as dynamical randomness to each other. The interplay of spins and orbitals is mediated by the Jahn-Teller lattice distortion that selects the choice of orbitals, which then generates variant spin exchange interactions ranging from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic ones. Our Monte Carlo simulations detect the power-law divergence of the relaxation times and the negative divergence of both the magnetic and dielectric non-linear susceptibilities, resolving the long-standing puzzle on the origin of the disorder-free spin glass.
We study the evolution of the low-temperature field-induced magnetic defects observed under an applied magnetic field in a series of frustrated amorphous ferromagnets (Fe$_{1-x}$Mn$_{x}$)$_{75}$P$_{16}$B$_{3}$Al$_{3}$ (a-FeMn). Combining small-angle neutron scattering and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the morphology of these defects resemble that of quasi-bidimensional spin vortices. They are observed in the reentrant spin-glass (RSG) phase, up to the critical concentration $x_{rm C} approx 0.36$ which separates the RSG and true spin glass (SG) within the low temperature part of the magnetic phase diagram of a-FeMn. These vortices systematically decrease in size with increasing magnetic field or decreasing the average exchange interaction, and they finally disappear in the SG sample ($x = 0.41$), being replaced by field-induced correlations over finite length scales. We argue that the study of these nanoscopic defects could be used to probe the nature of the critical line between the RSG and SG phases.
The ferromagnetic phase of an Ising model in d=3, with any amount of quenched antiferromagnetic bond randomness, is shown to undergo a transition to a spin-glass phase under sufficient quenched bond dilution. This general result, demonstrated here with the numerically exact renormalization-group solution of a d=3 hierarchical lattice, is expected to hold true generally, for the cubic lattice and for quenched site dilution. Conversely, in the ferromagnetic-spinglass-antiferromagnetic phase diagram, the spin-glass phase expands under quenched dilution at the expense of the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases. In the ferro-spinglass phase transition induced by quenched dilution reentrance is seen, as previously found for the ferro-spinglass transition induced by increasing the antiferromagnetic bond concentration.
We report here a detailed study of AC/DC magnetization and longitudinal/transverse transport properties of La$_{1.2}$Sr$_{1.8}$Mn$_{2}$O$_{7}$ single crystals below $T_{c}$ = 121 K. We find that the resistivity upturn below 40 K is related to the reentrant spin glass phase at the same temperature, accompanied by additional anomalous Hall effects. The carrier concentration from the ordinary Hall effects remains constant during the transition and is close to the nominal doping level (0.4 holes/Mn). The spin glass behavior comes from the competition between ferromagnetic double exchange and antiferromagnetic superexchange interactions, which leads to phase separation, i.e. a mixture of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic clusters, representing the canted antiferromagnetic state.