No Arabic abstract
We report the magnetic-field dependence of thermal conductivity (kappa) of an insulating cuprate Nd_2CuO_4 at very low temperatures down to 0.3 K. It is found that apart from the paramagnetic moments scattering on phonons, the Nd^{3+} magnons can act as either heat carriers or phonon scatterers, which strongly depends on the long-range antiferromagnetic transition and the field-induced transitions of spin structure. In particular, the Nd^{3+} magnons can effectively transport heat in the spin-flopped state of the Nd^{3+} sublattice. However, both the magnon transport and the magnetic scattering are quenched at very high fields. The spin re-orientations under the in-plane field can be conjectured from the detailed field dependence of kappa.
We report the study on the low-temperature heat transport of Ba_3Mn_2O_8 single crystal, a layered spin-dimer compound exhibiting the magnetic-field-induced magnetic order or the magnon Bose-Einstein condensation. The thermal conductivities (kappa) along both the ab plane and the c axis show nearly isotropic dependence on magnetic field, that is, kappa is strongly suppressed with increasing field, particularly at the critical fields of magnetic phase transitions. These results indicate that the magnetic excitations play a role of scattering phonons and the scattering effect is enhanced when the magnetic field closes the gap in the spin spectrum. In addition, the magnons in the BEC state of this materials do not show notable ability of carrying heat.
We study the low-temperature heat transport, as well as the magnetization and the specific heat, of TmMnO_3 single crystals to probe the transitions of magnetic structure induced by magnetic field. It is found that the low-T thermal conductivity (kappa) shows strong magnetic-field dependence and the overall behaviors can be understood in the scenario of magnetic scattering on phonons. In addition, a strong dip-like feature shows up in kappa(H) isotherms at 3.5--4 T for H parallel c, which is related to a known spin re-orientation of Mn^{3+} moments. The absence of this phenomenon for H parallel a indicates that the magnetic-structure transition of TmMnO_3 cannot be driven by the in-plane field. In comparison, the magnetothermal conductivity of TmMnO_3 is much larger than that of YMnO_3 but smaller than that of HoMnO_3, indicating that the magnetisms of rare-earth ions are playing the key role in the spin-phonon coupling of the hexagonal manganites.
The low-temperature thermal conductivity (kappa) of GdFeO_3 single crystals is found to be strongly dependent on magnetic field. The low-field kappa (H) curves show two dips for H parallel a and only one dip for H parallel c, with the characteristic fields having good correspondence with the spin-flop and the spin-polarization transitions. A remarkable phenomenon is that the subKelvin thermal conductivity shows hysteretic behaviors on the history of applying magnetic field, that is, the kappa(H) isotherms measured with field increasing are larger than those with field decreasing. Intriguingly, the broad region of magnetic field (sim 0--3 T) showing the irreversibility of heat transport coincides with that presenting the ferroelectricity. It is discussed that the irreversible kappa(H) behaviors are due to the phonon scattering by ferroelectric domain walls. This result shows an experimental feature that points to the capability of controlling the ferroelectric domain structures by magnetic field in multiferroic materials.
We have used a combination of neutron resonant spin-echo and triple-axis spectroscopies to determine the energy, fine structure, and linewidth of the magnon resonance in the model spin-1/2 ladder antiferromagnet IPA-CuCl_3 at temperatures T << Delta_0 /k_B, where Delta_0 is the spin gap at T=0. In this low-temperature regime we find that the results deviate substantially from the predictions of the non-linear sigma model proposed as a description of magnon excitations in one-dimensional quantum magnets and attribute these deviations to real-space and spin-space anisotropies in the spin Hamiltonian as well as scattering of magnon excitations from a dilute density of impurities. These effects are generic to experimental realizations of one-dimensional quantum magnets.
We report a systematic study on the low-temperature thermal conductivity (kappa) of R_2Ti_2O_7 (R = Gd and Er) single crystals with different directions of magnetic field and heat current. It is found that the magnetic excitations mainly act as phonon scatterers rather than heat carriers, although these two materials have long-range magnetic orders at low temperatures. The low-T kappa(H) isotherms of both compounds show rather complicated behaviors and have good correspondences with the magnetic transitions, where the kappa(H) curves show drastic dip- or step-like changes. In comparison, the field dependencies of kappa are more complicated in Gd_2Ti_2O_7, due to the complexity of its low-T phase diagram and field-induced magnetic transitions. These results demonstrate the significant coupling between spins and phonons in these materials and the ability of heat-transport properties probing the magnetic transitions.