Magnetic property and crystalline electric field effect in ThCr$_2$Si$_2$-type CeNi$_2$As$_2$

Yongkang Luo; Jinke Bao; Chenyi Shen; Jieke Han; Xiaojun Yang; Chen Lv; Yuke Li; Wenhe Jiao; Bingqi Si; Chunmu Feng; Jianhui Dai; Guanghan Cao; Zhu-an Xu

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.86.245130

paper

Magnetic property and crystalline electric field effect in ThCr $_{2}$ Si $_{2}$ -type CeNi $_{2}$ As $_{2}$

arXiv:1208.3843 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.86.245130

Abstract

Millimeter sized ThCr $_{2}$ Si $_{2}$ -type CeNi $_{2}$ As $_{2}$ single crystal was synthesized by NaAs flux method and its physical properties were investigated by magnetization, transport and specific heat measurements. In contrast to the previously reported CaBe $_{2}$ Ge $_{2}$ -type CeNi $_{2}$ As $_{2}$ , the ThCr $_{2}$ Si $_{2}$ -type CeNi $_{2}$ As $_{2}$ is a highly anisotropic uniaxial antiferromagnet with the transition temperature $T_{N}$ =4.8 K. A field induced spin flop transition was seen below $T_{N}$ when the applied $B$ is parallel to the $c$ -axis, the magnetic easy axis, together with a huge frustration parameter $f = θ_{W} / T_{N}$ . A pronounced Schottky-like anomaly in specific heat was also found around 160 K, which could be attributed to the crystalline electric field effect with the excitation energies being fitted to $Δ_{1} =$ 325 K and $Δ_{2} =$ 520 K, respectively. Moreover, the in-plane resistivity anisotropy and low temperature X-ray diffractions suggest that this compound is a rare example exhibiting a possible structure distortion induced by the $4 f$ -electron magnetic frustration.

10 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables

Magnetic property and crystalline electric field effect in ThCr2​Si2​-type CeNi2​As2​

Abstract

References in corpus (15)

Magnetic property and crystalline electric field effect in ThCr $_{2}$ Si $_{2}$ -type CeNi $_{2}$ As $_{2}$