Low-temperature crystal and magnetic structure of α -RuCl 3
By Huibo Cao, A. Banerjee, J.-Q. Yan, C. Bridges, M. Lumsden, D. Mandrus, D. Tennant, Bryan C. Chakoumakos, S. Nagler. 2016
235 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Here, single crystals of the Kitaev spin-liquid candidate α – RuCl3 have been studied to determine the low-temperature bulk properties, the structure, and the magnetic ground state. Refinements of x-ray diffraction data show that the low-temperature crystal structure is described by space group C2/m with a nearly perfect honeycomb lattice exhibiting less than 0.2% in-plane distortion. The as-grown single crystals exhibit only one sharp magnetic transition at TN = 7 K. The magnetic order below this temperature exhibits a propagation vector of k=(0,1,1/3), which coincides with a three-layer stacking of the C2/m unit cells. Magnetic transitions at higher temperatures up to 14 K can be introduced by deformations of the crystal that result in regions in the crystal with a two-layer stacking sequence. The best-fit symmetry-allowed magnetic structure of the as-grown crystals shows that the spins lie in the ac plane, with a zigzag configuration in each honeycomb layer. The three-layer repeat out-of-plane structure can be refined as a 120° spiral order or a collinear structure with a spin direction of 35° away from the a axis. The collinear spin configuration yields a slightly better fit and also is physically preferred. The average ordered moment in either structure is lessmore » than 0.45(5) μB per Ru3+ ion.« less
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8269bbcc7783729479c5d1a3de3cda795bb2890c
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Kitaev materials (2017, background): “With an eye towards a material realization of the (pure) Kitaev model several experimental signatures have been discussed including the dynamical response [57, 58], whose distinct spectral gap can be probed via inelastic neutron scattering (INS) or electron spin resonance (ESR), the Raman response [”