2007/04/08 by M. Matsuda, Masaaki Matsuda, Hiroaki Ueda +14 · 120 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Condensed matter physics #Frustration #Ground state #Lattice (music) #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Magnetic field #Magnetization #Multiferroics and related materials #Physics #Quantum mechanics #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nphys586
published in Nature Physics 3(6), 397-400 (Nature Portfolio)
openalex publication_date 2007/04/08 · arxiv created 2007/07/02 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Magnetic systems are fertile ground for the emergence of exotic states when the magnetic interactions cannot be satisfied simultaneously due to the topology of the lattice - a situation known as geometrical frustration. Spinels, AB2O4, can realize the most highly frustrated network of corner-sharing tetrahedra. Several novel states have been discovered in spinels, such as composite spin clusters and novel charge-ordered states. Here we use neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering to characterize the fractional magnetization state of HgCr2O4 under an external magnetic field, H. When the field is applied in its Neel ground state, a phase transition occurs at H ~ 10 Tesla at which each tetrahedron changes from a canted Neel state to a fractional spin state with the total spin, Stet, of S/2 and the lattice undergoes orthorhombic to cubic symmetry change. Our results provide the microscopic one-to-one correspondence between the spin state and the lattice distortion.