Effect of Ge-substitution on Magnetic Properties in the Itinerant Chiral Magnet MnSi

Abstract

We have investigated the effect of Ge-substitution to the magnetic ordering in the B20 itinerant chiral magnet MnSi prepared by melting and annealing under ambient pressure. From metallurgical survey, the solubility limit of Ge was found to be $x=0.144(5)$ with annealing temperature $T_{\mathrm{an}}=1073$ K. Magnetization measurements on MnSi${}_{1-x}$Ge${}_x$ samples show that the helical ordering temperature $T_{\mathrm{c}}$ increases rapidly in the low-$x$ range, whereas it becomes saturated at higher concentration $x>0.1$. The Ge substitution also increases both the saturation magnetization $M_{\mathrm{s}}$ and the critical field to the fully polarized state $H_{c2}$. In contrast to the saturation behavior of $T_{\mathrm{c}}$, those parameters increase linearly up to the highest Ge concentration investigated. In the temperature-magnetic field phase diagram, we found enlargement of the skyrmion phase region for large $x$ samples. We, furthermore, observed the non-linear behavior of helical modulation vector $k$ as a function of Ge concentration, which can be described qualitatively using the mean field approximation.

arXiv comment9 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Skyrmion Lattice in a Chiral Magnet
• Topological Hall effect in the A-phase of MnSi
• Magnetic phase diagram of MnSi inferred from magnetization and ac susceptibility
• Cubic magnets with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction at low T
• Implications of the B20 Crystal Structure for the Magneto-electronic Structure of MnSi
• Magnetic Fluctuations and Correlations in MnSi - Evidence for a Skyrmion Spin Liquid Phase
• Frustrated magnetic helices in MnSi-type crystals
• Effect of Negative Pressure on the Prototypical Itinerant Magnet MnSi
• Exploring the origins of the Dzyalloshinski-Moria interaction in MnSi

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Direct observations of spin fluctuations in spin-hedgehog-anti-hedgehog lattice states in MnSi${}_{1-x}$Ge${}_x$ ($x=0.6$ and $0.8$) at zero magnetic field