Antiferromagnetic transition in EuFe 2 As 2 : A possible parent compound for superconductors

By Z. Ren, Zengwei Zhu, Shuai Jiang, Xiangfan Xu, Q. Tao, Cao Wang, C. Feng, G. Cao, Zhu’an Xu. 2008

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ternary iron arsenide EuFe$_2$As$_2$ with ThCr$_2$Si$_2$-type structure has been studied by magnetic susceptibility, resistivity, thermopower, Hall and specific heat measurements. The compound undergoes two magnetic phase transitions at about 200 K and 20 K, respectively. The former was found to be accompanied with a slight drop in magnetic susceptibility (after subtracting the Curie-Weiss paramagnetic contribution), a rapid decrease in resistivity, a large jump in thermopower and a sharp peak in specific heat with decreasing temperature, all of which point to a spin-density-wave-like antiferromagnetic transition. The latter was proposed to be associated with an A-type antiferromagnetic ordering of Eu$^{2+}$ moments. Comparing with the physical properties of the iso-structural compounds BaFe$_2$As$_2$ and SrFe$_2$As$_2$, we expect that superconductivity could be induced in EuFe$_2$As$_2$ through appropriate doping.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6fbe342a078be0580e0d5fe300b6121e39879a4