2024/05/13 by A. Brassington, Brassington, A., Qianli Ma +21 · 4 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Studies #High-pressure geophysics and materials #Magnetic Properties of Alloys #Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.08230
openalex publication_date 2024/05/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Polycrystalline and single crystal samples of the insulating Shastry-Sutherland compound Er2Be2SiO7 were synthesized via a solid-state reaction and the floating zone method respectively. The crystal structure, Er single ion anisotropy, zero-field magnetic ground state, and magnetic phase diagrams along high-symmetry crystallographic directions were investigated by bulk measurement techniques, x-ray and neutron diffraction, and neutron spectroscopy. We establish that Er2Be2SiO7 crystallizes in a tetragonal space group with planes of orthogonal Er dimers and a strong preference for the Er moments to lie in the local plane perpendicular to each dimer bond. We also find that this system has a non-collinear ordered ground state in zero field with a transition temperature of 0.841 K consisting of antiferromagnetic dimers and in-plane moments. Finally, we mapped out the H-T phase diagrams for Er2Be2SiO7 along the directions H ∥ [001], [100], and [110]. While an increasing in-plane field simply induces a phase transition to a field-polarized phase, we identify three metamagnetic transitions before the field-polarized phase is established in the H ∥ [001] case. This complex behavior establishes insulating Er2Be2SiO7 and other isostructural family members as promising candidates for uncovering exotic magnetic properties and phenomena that can be readily compared to theoretical predictions of the exactly soluble Shastry-Sutherland model.