The antiferromagnetic order and structural distortion in the LaFe(As1-xSbx)O system have been investigated by powder neutron diffraction and physical properties measurements. Polycrystalline samples of LaFe(As1-xSbx)O (x<0.5) were prepared using soli
d state synthesis at ambient and high pressure. We find that the isoelectronic substitution of Sb for As decreases the structural and magnetic transition temperatures but, contrary to the effects of phosphorus substitution, superconductivity is not induced. Instead a slight increase in the Fe magnetic moment is observed.
We performed far-infrared optical spectroscopy measurements on the heavy fermion compound URu 2 Si 2 as a function of temperature. The lights electric-field was applied along the a-axis or the c-axis of the tetragonal structure. We show that in addit
ion to a pronounced anisotropy, the optical conductivity exhibits for both axis a partial suppression of spectral weight around 12 meV and below 30 K. We attribute these observations to a change in the bandstructure below 30 K. However, since these changes have no noticeable impact on the entropy nor on the DC transport properties, we suggest that this is a crossover phenomenon rather than a thermodynamic phase transition.
We present magnetic torque measurements on the Shastry-Sutherland quantum spin system SrCu$_2$(BO$_3$)$_2$ in fields up to 31 T and temperatures down to 50 mK. A new quantum phase is observed in a 1 T field range above the 1/8 plateau, in agreement w
ith recent NMR results. Since the presence of the DM coupling precludes the existence of a true Bose-Einstein condensation and the formation of a supersolid phase in SrCu$_2$(BO$_3$)$_2$, the exact nature of the new phase in the vicinity of the plateau remains to be explained. Comparison between magnetization and torque data reveals a huge contribution of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction to the torque response. Finally, our measurements demonstrate the existence of a supercooling due to adiabatic magnetocaloric effects in pulsed field experiments.
