Emergent 1/3 magnetization plateaus in pyroxene CoGeO${}_3$

Abstract

Despite the absence of an apparent triangular pattern in the crystal structure, we observe unusually well pronounced 1/3 magnetization plateaus in the quasi one-dimensional Ising spin chain compound CoGeO${}_3$ which belongs to the class of pyroxene minerals. We succeeded in uncovering the detailed microscopic spin structure of the 1/3 magnetization plateau phase by means of neutron diffraction. We observed changes of the initial antiferromagnetic zero-field spin structure that are resembling a regular formation of antiferromagnetic "domain wall boundaries", resulting in a kind of modulated magnetic structure with 1/3-integer propagation vector. The net ferromagnetic moment emerges at these "domain walls" whereas two third of all antiferromagnetic chain alignments can be still preserved. We propose a microscopic model on the basis of an anisotropic frustrated square lattice to explain the observations.

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