The suppression of magnetic order with pressure concomitant with the appearance of pressure- induced superconductivity was recently discovered in CrAs. Here we present a neutron diffraction study of the pressure evolution of the helimagnetic ground-s
tate towards and in the vicinity of the superconducting phase. Neutron diffraction on polycrystalline CrAs was employed from zero pressure to 0.65 GPa and at various temperatures. The helimagnetic long-range order is sustained under pressure and the magnetic propagation vector does not show any considerable change. The average ordered magnetic moment is reduced from 1.73(2) {mu}B at ambient pressure to 0.4(1) {mu}B close to the critical pressure Pc=0.7 GPa, at which magnetic order is completely suppressed. The width of the magnetic Bragg peaks strongly depends on temperature and pressure, showing a maximum in the region of the onset of superconductivity. We interpret this as associated with competing ground-states in the vicinity of the superconducting phase.
Inelastic neutron scattering was employed to study the crystal-field interaction in the strontium-doped rare-earth compounds R(x)Sr(1-x)CoO(3-z) (R=Pr, Nd, Ho, and Er). Particular emphasis is laid on the effect of oxygen deficiencies which naturally
occur in the synthesis of these compounds. The observed energy spectra are found to be the result of a superposition of crystal fields with different nearest-neighbor oxygen coordination at the R sites. The experimental data are interpreted in terms of crystal-field parameters which behave in a consistent manner through the rare-earth series, thereby allowing a reliable extrapolation for rare-earth ions not considered in the present work.
This paper presents results of a recent study of multiferroic CCO by means of single crystal neutron diffraction. This system has two close magnetic phase transitions at $T sub{N1}=24.2$ K and $T sub{N2}=23.6$ K. The low temperature magnetic structur
e below $T sub{N2}$ is unambiguously determined to be a fully 3-dimensional proper screw. Between $T sub{N1}$ and $T sub{N2}$ antiferromagnetic order is found that is essentially 2-dimensional. In this narrow temperature range, magnetic near neighbor correlations are still long range in the ($H,K$) plane, whereas nearest neighbors along the $L$-direction are uncorrelated. Thus, the multiferroic state is realized only in the low-temperature 3-dimensional state and not in the 2-dimensional state.
We investigate the doping dependence of the nanoscale electronic and magnetic inhomogeneities in the hole-doping range 0.002<x<0.1 of cobalt based perovskites, La{1-x}Sr_xCoO_3. Using single crystal inelastic neutron scattering and magnetization meas
urements we show that the lightly doped system exhibits magneto-electronic phase separation in form of spin-state polarons. Higher hole doping leads to a decay of spin-state polarons in favor of larger-scale magnetic clusters, due to competing ferromagnetic correlations of Co^{3+} ions which are formed by neighboring polarons. The present data give evidence for two regimes of magneto-electronic phase separation in this system: (i) x<0.05, dominated by ferromagnetic intrapolaron interactions, and (ii) x>0.05, dominated by Co^{3+}-Co^{3+} intracluster interactions. Our conclusions are in good agreement with a recently proposed model of the phase separation in cobalt perovskites [He et al., Europhys. Lett. 87, 27006 (2009)].
