Low-temperature hysteresis broadening emerging from domain-wall creep dynamics in a two-phase competing system

Abstract

Hysteretic behaviour accompanies any first-order phase transition, forming a basis for many applications. However, its quantitative understanding remains challenging, and even a qualitative understanding of pronounced hysteresis broadening at low temperature, which is often observed in magnetic-field-induced first-order phase transition materials, is unclear. Here, we show that such pronounced hysteresis broadening emerges if the phase-front velocity during the first-order phase transition exhibits an activated behaviour as a function of both temperature and magnetic field. This is demonstrated by using real-space magnetic imaging techniques, for the magnetic-field-induced first-order phase transition between antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic phases in (Fe${}_{0.95}$Zn${}_{0.05}$)${}_2$Mo${}_3$O${}_8$. When combined with the Kolmogorov-Avrami-Ishibashi model, the observed activated temperature- and field-dependences of the growth velocity of the emerging antiferromagnetic domain quantitatively reproduce the pronounced hysteresis broadening. Furthermore, the same approach also reproduces the field-sweep-rate dependence of the transition field observed in the experiment. Our findings thus provide a quantitative and comprehensive understanding of pronounced hysteresis broadening from the microscopic perspective of domain growth.

arXiv comment32 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tunable bifurcation of magnetic anisotropy and bi-oriented antiferromagnetic order in kagome metal GdTi3Bi4