No Arabic abstract
The phase coexistence present through a first-order phase transition means there will be finite regions between the two phases where the structure of the system will vary from one phase to the other, known as a phase boundary wall. This region is said to play an important but unknown role in the dynamics of the first-order phase transitions. Here, by using both x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy and magnetometry techniques to measure the temporal isothermal development at various points through the thermally activated first-order metamagnetic phase transition present in the near-equiatomic FeRh alloy, we are able to isolate the dynamic behavior of the domain walls in this system. These investigations reveal that relaxation behavior of the domain walls changes when phase coexistence is introduced into the system and that the domain wall dynamics is different to the macroscale behavior. We attribute this to the effect of the exchange coupling between regions of either magnetic phase changing the dynamic properties of domain walls relative to bulk regions of either phase. We also believe this behavior comes from the influence of the phase boundary wall on other magnetic objects in the system.
Magnetic imaging based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond has emerged as a powerful tool for probing magnetic phenomena in fields ranging from biology to physics. A key strength of NV sensing is its local-probe nature, enabling high-resolution spatial images of magnetic stray fields emanating from a sample. However, this local character can also form a drawback for analysing the global properties of a system, such as a phase transition temperature. Here, we address this challenge by using statistical analyses of magnetic-field maps to characterize the first-order temperature-driven metamagnetic phase transition from the antiferromagnetic to the ferromagnetic state in FeRh. After imaging the phase transition and identifying the regimes of nucleation, growth, and coalescence of ferromagnetic domains, we statistically characterize the spatial magnetic-field maps to extract the transition temperature and thermal hysteresis width. By analysing the spatial correlations of the maps and their dependence on an external magnetic field, we investigate the magnetocrystalline anisotropy and detect a reorientation of domain walls across the phase transition. The employed statistical approach can be extended to the study of other magnetic phenomena with NV magnetometry or other sensing techniques.
The antiferromagnetic (AFM) to ferromagnetic (FM) first order phase transition of an epitaxial FeRh thin-film has been studied with x-ray magnetic circular dichroism using photoemission electron microscopy. The FM phase is magnetized in-plane due to shape anisotropy, but the magnetocrystalline anisotropy is negligible and there is no preferred in-plane magnetization direction. When heating through the AFM to FM phase transition the nucleation of the FM phase occurs at many independent nucleation sites with random domain orientation. The domains subsequently align to form the final FM domain structure. We observe no pinning of the FM domain structure.
Coupled order parameters in phase-transition materials can be controlled using various driving forces such as temperature, magnetic and electric field, strain, spin-polarized currents and optical pulses. Tuning the material properties to achieve efficient transitions would enable fast and low-power electronic devices. Here we show that the first-order metamagnetic phase transition in FeRh films becomes strongly asymmetric in mesoscale structures. In patterned FeRh stripes we observed pronounced supercooling and an avalanche-like abrupt transition from the ferromagnetic to the antiferromagnetic phase while the reverse transition remains nearly continuous over a broad temperature range. Although modest asymmetry signatures have been found in FeRh films, the effect is dramatically enhanced at the mesoscale. The asymmetry in the transitions is independent of applied magnetic fields and the activation volume of the antiferromagnetic phase is more than two orders of magnitude larger than typical magnetic heterogeneities observed in films. The collective behavior upon cooling results from the role of long-range ferromagnetic exchange correlations that become important at the mesoscale and should be a general property of first-order magnetic phase transitions.
In magnetic Weyl semimetals, fluctuations of the local magnetization may generate gauge fields that couple to the chiral charge of emergent Weyl fermions. Recent theoretical studies have proposed that the temporal and spatial-dependent magnetization associated with propagating domain walls (DWs) generates pseudo electric and magnetic fields that drive novel phenomena such as a current of real charge. Here we report a key step in testing these predictions: characterizing the propagation of DWs in the Weyl semimetal Co3Sn2S2 using scanning magneto-optic Kerr microscopy. We observe an unexpected deep minimum in the temperature dependence of the DW mobility, $mu$, indicating a crossover between two regimes of propagation. The nonmonotonic $mu(T)$ is evidence of a phase transition in the topology of the DW well below the Curie temperature, in which the magnetization texture changes from continuous rotation (elliptical wall) to a linear wall whose unidirectional magnetization passes through zero at the wall center.
Based on ab initio total energy calculations we show that two magnetic states of rhodium atoms together with competing ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic exchange interactions are responsible for a temperature induced metamagnetic phase transition, which experimentally is observed for stoichiometric alpha-FeRh. A first-principle spin-based model allows to reproduce this first-order metamagnetic transition by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Further inclusion of spacial variation of exchange parameters leads to a realistic description of the experimental magneto-volume effects in alpha-FeRh.