Strain-tunable metamagnetic critical endpoint in Mott insulating rare-earth titanates

Abstract

Rare-earth titanates are Mott insulators whose magnetic ground state -- antiferromagnetic (AFM) or ferromagnetic (FM) -- can be tuned by the radius of the rare-earth element. Here, we combine phenomenology and first-principles calculations to shed light on the generic magnetic phase diagram of a chemically substituted titanate on the rare-earth site that interpolates between an AFM and a FM state. Octahedral rotations present in these perovskites cause the AFM order to acquire a small FM component -- and vice-versa -- removing any multicritical point from the phase diagram. However, for a wide parameter range, a first-order metamagnetic transition line terminating at a critical endpoint survives inside the magnetically ordered phase. Like the liquid-gas transition, a Widom line emerges from the endpoint, characterized by enhanced fluctuations. In contrast to metallic FMs, this metamagnetic transition involves two symmetry-equivalent and insulating canted spin states. Moreover, instead of a magnetic field, we show that uniaxial strain can be used to tune this transition to zero temperature, inducing a quantum critical endpoint.

8 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Topological transition from nodal to nodeless Zeeman splitting in altermagnets
• Mirror Chern Bands and Weyl Nodal Loops in Altermagnets
• Uniaxial strain control of bulk ferromagnetism in rare-earth titanates
• Strain-tuned quantum criticality in electronic Potts-nematic systems
• Dynamics of photo-induced ferromagnetism in oxides with orbital degeneracy
• Thermodynamics of $s_{\pm }-to-s_{++}$ transition in iron pnictides in the vicinity of the Born limit
• Critical point of the transition between $s_{\pm }$ and $s_{++}$ states of a two-band superconductor with nonmagnetic impurities
• Effect of random antiferromagnetic exchange on the spin waves in a three-dimensional Heisenberg ferromagnet