1. Crystal Growth and Magnetic Properties of Topological Nodal-Line Semimetal GdSbTe with Antiferromagnetic Spin Ordering
- Author
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Wei-Li Lee, Rakesh Kumar, K. Ramesh Babu, Cheng-Yen Wen, I. Panneer Muthuselvam, Guang-Yu Guo, Karthik Rajagopal, Raman Sankar, G. Senthil Murugan, Tsung-Chi Wu, and Fangcheng Chou
- Subjects
Magnetic moment ,Condensed matter physics ,010405 organic chemistry ,Chemistry ,Spin structure ,010402 general chemistry ,01 natural sciences ,0104 chemical sciences ,Inorganic Chemistry ,Magnetization ,Magnetic anisotropy ,Tetragonal crystal system ,Density of states ,Antiferromagnetism ,Physical and Theoretical Chemistry ,Single crystal - Abstract
We report crystal growth, AC and DC magnetic susceptibilities [χ(T, H)], magnetization [M(T, H)], and heat capacity [CP(T, H)] measurement results of GdSbTe single crystal. GdSbTe is isostructural to the confirmed nonmagnetic nodal-line semimetal ZrSiS of noncentrosymmetric tetragonal crystal structure in space group P4/nmm (No. 129), but it shows additional long-range antiferromagnetic spin ordering for the Gd spins of S = 7/2 below TN. Both χ(T, H) and CP(T, H) measurements confirm the existence of a long-range antiferromagnetic (AFM) spin ordering of Gd spins below TN ∼ 12 K, and an additional spin reorientation/recovery (sr) behavior is identified from the change of on-site spin anisotropy between Tsr1 ∼ 7 and Tsr2 ∼ 4 K. The anisotropic magnetic susceptibilities of χ(T, H) below TN clearly demonstrate that the AFM long-range spin ordering of GdSbTe has an easy axis parallel to the ab-plane direction. The field- and orientation-dependent magnetization of M(T, H) at 2 K shows two plateaus to indicate the spin-flop transition for H||ab near ∼2.1 T and a metamagnetic state near ∼5.9 T having ∼1/3 of the fully polarized magnetization by the applied field. The heat capacity measurement results yield Sommerfeld coefficient of γ ∼ 7.6(4) mJ/mol K2 and θD ∼ 195(2) K being less than half of that for the nonmagnetic ZrSiS. A three-dimensional (3D) AFM spin structure is supported by the ab initio calculations for Gd having magnetic moment of 7.1 μB and the calculated AFM band structure indicates that GdSbTe is a semimetal with bare density of states (0.36 states/eV fu) at the Fermi level, which is 10 times smaller than the measured one to suggest strong spin-fluctuation.
- Published
- 2019