Competing magnetic interactions and magnetocaloric effect in HoSn
arXiv:2106.13173 · doi:10.1088/1361-648X/ac2cf1
Abstract
The rare-earth intermetallic compound HoSn demonstrates fascinating magnetic properties which include temperature-driven multiple magnetic transitions and field driven metamagnetism. We address the magnetic character of this exciting compound through a combined experimental and theoretical studies. HoSn orders antiferromagnetically below K, and shows further spin reorientation transitions at 15 K and 12 K. We observe a sizable amount of low-temperature magnetocaloric effect in HoSn with a maximum value of entropy change = -9.5 JKgK for an applied field of = 50 kOe at around 30 K. The field hysteresis is almost zero above 15 K where magneto-caloric effect is important. Interestingly, is found to change its sign from positive to negative as the temperature is increased above about 8 K, which can be linked to the multiple spin reorientation transitions. The signature of the metamagnetism is visible in the versus plot. The magnetic ground-state, obtained from the density functional theory based calculation, is susceptible to the effective Coulomb interaction () between electrons. Depending upon the value of , the ground-state can be ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic. The compound shows large relaxation (14\% change in magnetization in 60 min) in the field cooled state with a logarithmic time variation, which may be connected to the competing magnetic ground-states observed in our theoretical calculations. The competing magnetic ground-states is also evident from the small value of the paramagnetic Curie-Weiss temperature.
10 pages, 6 figures