Magnetic properties of the Ag-In-rare-earth 1/1 approximants

Abstract

We have performed magnetic susceptibility and neutron scattering measurements on polycrystalline Ag-In-RE (RE: rare-earth) 1/1 approximants. In the magnetic susceptibility measurements, for most of the RE elements, inverse susceptibility shows linear behaviour in a wide temperature range, confirming well localized isotropic moments for the RE${}^{3+}$ ions. Exceptionally for the light RE elements, such as Ce and Pr, non-linear behaviour was observed, possibly due to significant crystalline field splitting or valence fluctuation. For RE = Tb, the susceptibility measurement clearly shows a bifurcation of the field-cooled and zero-field-cooled susceptibility at $T_{\mathrm{f}}=3.7$~K, suggesting a spin-glass-like freezing. On the other hand, neutron scattering measurements detect significant development of short-range antiferromagnetic spin correlations in elastic channel, which accompanied by a broad peak at $\hslash \omega =4$~meV in inelastic scattering spectrum. These features have striking similarity to those in the Zn-Mg-Tb quasicrystals, suggesting that the short-range spin freezing behaviour is due to local high symmetry clusters commonly seen in both the systems.

14 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum Antiferromagnetism in Quasicrystals
• Noncollinear magnetic order in quasicrystals
• Structure analysis of Zn-Mg-Ho icosahedral quasicrystal by modified Rietveld method using ellipsoid and sphere windows

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