No Arabic abstract
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 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.
Landau Fermi liquid theory, with its pivotal assertion that electrons in metals can be simply understood as independent particles with effective masses replacing the free electron mass, has been astonishingly successful. This is true despite the Coulomb interactions an electron experiences from the host crystal lattice, its defects, and the other ~1022/cm3 electrons. An important extension to the theory accounts for the behaviour of doped semiconductors1,2. Because little in the vast literature on materials contradicts Fermi liquid theory and its extensions, exceptions have attracted great attention, and they include the high temperature superconductors3, silicon-based field effect transistors which host two-dimensional metals4, and certain rare earth compounds at the threshold of magnetism5-8. The origin of the non-Fermi liquid behaviour in all of these systems remains controversial. Here we report that an entirely different and exceedingly simple class of materials - doped small gap semiconductors near a metal-insulator transition - can also display a non-Fermi liquid state. Remarkably, a modest magnetic field functions as a switch which restores the ordinary disordered Fermi liquid. Our data suggest that we have finally found a physical realization of the only mathematically rigourous route to a non-Fermi liquid, namely the undercompensated Kondo effect, where there are too few mobile electrons to compensate for the spins of unpaired electrons localized on impurity atoms9-12.
Neutron diffraction measurements on single crystals of Cr1-xVx (x=0, 0.02, 0.037) show that the ordering moment and the Neel temperature are continuously suppressed as x approaches 0.037, a proposed Quantum Critical Point (QCP). The wave vector Q of the spin density wave (SDW) becomes more incommensurate as x increases in accordance with the two band model. At xc=0.037 we have found temperature dependent, resolution limited elastic scattering at 4 incommensurate wave vectors Q=(1+/-delta_1,2, 0, 0)*2pi/a, which correspond to 2 SDWs with Neel temperatures of 19 K and 300 K. Our neutron diffraction measurements indicate that the electronic structure of Cr is robust, and that tuning Cr to its QCP results not in the suppression of antiferromagnetism, but instead enables new spin ordering due to novel nesting of the Fermi surface of Cr.
Co3Sn2S2 has generated a growing interest as a rare example of the highly uniaxial anisotropic kagome ferromagnet showing a combination of frustrated-lattice magnetism and topology. Recently, via precise measurements of the magnetization and AC susceptibility we have found a low-field anomalous magnetic phase (A-phase) with very slow spin dynamics that appears just below the Curie temperature (T_C). The A-phase hosts high-density domain bubbles after cooling through T_C as revealed in a previous in-situ Lorentz-TEM study. Here, we present further signatures of the anomalous magnetic transition (MT) at T_C revealed by a study of the critical behaviors of the magnetization and magnetocaloric effect using a high-quality single crystal. Analyses of numerous magnetization isotherms around T_C (177 K) using different approaches (the modified Arrot plot, Kouvel-Fisher method and magnetocaloric effect) result in consistent critical exponents that do not satisfy the theoretical predictions of standard second-order-MT models. Scaling analyses for the magnetization, magnetic entropy change and field-exponent of the magnetic entropy change, all consistently show low-field deviations below TC from the universal curves. Our results reveal that the MT of Co3Sn2S2 can not be explained as a conventional second-order type and suggest an anomalous magnetic state below T_C.
We report specific heat, resistivity and susceptibility measurements at different temperatures, magnetic fields, and pressures to provide solid evidence of CoS2 being a marginal Fermi liquid. The presence of a tricritical point in the phase diagram of the system provides an opportunity to test the spin fluctuation theory with a high limit of accuracy. A magnetic field suppresses the amplitude of the spin fluctuations and recovers conventional Fermi liquid behavior, connecting both states continuously.