No Arabic abstract
We present a method for measuring thermal expansion under tunable uniaxial stresses, and show measurements of the thermal expansion of Mn$_3$Sn, a room temperature antiferromagnet that exhibits a spontaneous Hall effect, under uniaxial stresses of up to 1.51 GPa compression. Measurement of thermal expansion provides thermodynamic data about the nature of phase transitions, and uniaxial stress provides a powerful tuning method that does not introduce disorder. Mn$_3$Sn exhibits an anomaly in its thermal expansion near $sim$270 K, associated with a first-order change in its magnetic structure. We show this transition temperature is suppressed by 54.6 K by 1.51 GPa compression along [0001]. We find the associated entropy change at the transition to be $sim$ 0.1 J mol$^{-1}$ K$^{-1}$ and to vary only weakly with applied stress.
Thermal expansion and magnetostriction are directional dependent thermodynamic quantities. For the characterization of novel quantum phases of matter it is required to study materials under multi-extreme conditions, in particular down to very low temperatures, in very high magnetic fields, as well as under high pressure. We developed a miniaturized capacitive dilatometer suitable for temperatures down to 20 mK and usage in high magnetic fields, which exerts a large spring force between 40 to 75 N on the sample. This corresponds to a uniaxial stress up to 3 kbar for a sample with cross-section of (0.5~mm)$^2$. We describe the design and performance test of the dilatometer which resolves length changes with high resolution of $0.02 mathrm{AA}$ at low temperatures. The miniaturized device can be utilized in any standard cryostat, including dilution refrigerators or the commercial physical property measurement system.
Mn$_{3}$Sn is a non-collinear antiferromagnet which displays a large anomalous Hall effect at room temperature. It is believed that the principal contribution to its anomalous Hall conductivity comes from Berry curvature. Moreover, dc transport and photoemission experiments have confirmed that Mn$_{3}$Sn may be an example of a time-reversal symmetry breaking Weyl semimetal. Due to a small, but finite moment in the room temperature inverse triangular spin structure, which allows control of the Hall current with external field, this material has garnered much interest for next generation memory devices and THz spintronics applications. In this work, we report a THz range study of oriented Mn$_{3}$Sn thin films as a function of temperature. At low frequencies we found the optical conductivity can be well described by a single Drude oscillator. The plasma frequency is strongly suppressed in a temperature dependent fashion as one enters the 260 K helical phase. This may be associated with partial gapping of the Fermi surfaces that comes from breaking translational symmetry along the c-axis. The scattering rate shows quadratic temperature dependence below 200 K, highlighting the possible important role of interactions in this compound.
The search for novel topological phases of matter in quantum magnets has emerged as a frontier of condensed matter physics. Here we use state-of-the-art angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to investigate single crystals of Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ in its ferromagnetic phase. We report for the first time signatures of a topological Weyl loop. From fundamental symmetry considerations, this magnetic Weyl loop is expected to be gapless if spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is strictly zero but gapped, with possible Weyl points, under finite SOC. We point out that high-resolution ARPES results to date cannot unambiguously resolve the SOC gap anywhere along the Weyl loop, leaving open the possibility that Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ hosts zero Weyl points or some non-zero number of Weyl points. On the surface of our samples, we further observe a possible Fermi arc, but we are unable to clearly verify its topological nature using the established counting criteria. As a result, we argue that from the point of view of photoemission spectroscopy the presence of Weyl points and Fermi arcs in Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ remains ambiguous. Our results have implications for ongoing investigations of Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ and other topological magnets.
We report the evolution of a charge density wave (CDW) state in the quasi-2D rare-earth tritellurides ($R$Te$_3$ for $R$=Er,Tm) as a function of in-plane uniaxial stress. Measurements of the elastocaloric effect, resistivity, and elastoresistivity allow us to demonstrate the importance of in-plane antisymmetric strain on the CDW and to establish a phase diagram. We show that modest tensile stress parallel to the in-plane $a$-axis can reversibly switch the direction of the ordering wavevector between the two in-plane directions. This work establishes $R$Te$_3$ as a promising model system for the study of strain-CDW interactions in a quasi-2D square lattice.
Hexagonal CeRhSn with paramagnetic $4f$ moments on a distorted Kagome lattice displays zero-field quantum critical behavior related to geometrical frustration. We report high-resolution thermal expansion and magnetostriction measurements under multiextreme conditions such as uniaxial stress up to 200 MPa, temperatures down to 0.1 K and magnetic fields up to 10 T. Under uniaxial stress along the $a$-direction, quantum criticality disappears and a complex magnetic phase diagram arises with a sequence of phases below 1.2 K and fields between 0 and 3 T ($parallel a$). Since the Kondo coupling increases with stress, which alone would stabilize paramagnetic behavior in CeRhSn, the observed order arises from the release of geometrical frustration by in-plane stress.