The incommensurate magnet iron monophosphide FeP: Crystal growth and characterization

Abstract

We report an optimized chemical vapor transport method, which allows growing FeP single crystals up to 500 mg in mass and 80 $m{m}^3$ in volume. The high quality of the crystals obtained by this method was confirmed by means of EDX, high-resolution TEM, low-temperature single crystal XRD and neutron diffraction experiments. We investigated the transport and magnetic properties of the single crystals and calculated the electronic band structure of FeP. We show both theoretically and experimentally, that the ground state of FeP is metallic. The examination of the magnetic data reveals antiferromagnetic order below T${}_N$ =119 K while transport remains metallic in both the paramagnetic and the antiferromagnetic phase. The analysis of the neutron diffraction data shows an incommensurate magnetic structure with the propagation vector Q=(0, 0, $\pm \delta$), where $\delta$ $\sim$ 0.2. For the full understanding of the magnetic state, further experiments are needed. The successful growth of large high-quality single crystals opens the opportunity for further investigations of itinerant magnets with incommensurate spin structures using a wide range of experimental tools.

References in corpus (5)

• Superconductivity in the vicinity of antiferromagnetic order in CrAs
• Pressure induced superconductivity on the border of magnetic order in MnP
• Non-collinear spin-density wave antiferromagnetism in FeAs
• Evidence for triplet superconductivity near an antiferromagnetic instability in CrAs
• Elucidation of the helical spin structure of FeAs

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Topologically-Driven Linear Magnetoresistance in Helimagnetic FeP
• Frustration model and spin excitations in the helimagnet FeP
• Lattice dynamics in the double-helix antiferromagnet FeP
• NMR study of magnetic structure and hyperfine interactions in binary helimagnet FeP