Diffuse magnetic scattering in the frustrated kagomé lattice compound Fe4Si2Sn7O16
We recently reported long-range Néel ordering in Fe4Si2Sn7O16. The only magnetic ions are layers of high-spin Fe(II) (d6, S = 2) arranged on perfect kagomé lattices. Below TN = 3.5 K, 2/3 of these Fe(II) ions order into canted AFM chains, separated by the remaining 1/3 which are geometrically frustrated and show no long-range order down to at least 0.1 K according to conventional neutron powder diffraction. Moessbauer spectroscopy shows that there is no static order on the latter 1/3 of the Fe(II) ions - i.e., they are in a liquid-like rather than a frozen state - down to at least 1.65 K. Although the propagation vector k = (0, 1/2, 1/2) breaks hexagonal symmetry, we see no evidence for a lattice distortion within the resolution of our data. To the best of our knowledge, this type of magnetic order on a kagomé lattice has no precedent experimentally and has not been explicitly predicted theoretically. In the experiment proposed here, we wish to probe this liquid-like state in more detail, by using polarised neutrons on D7 to search for magnetic diffuse scattering associated with possible short-range ordering of the 1/3 of HS Fe(II) ions that resist long-range order down to 0.1 K.
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LING Chris; ALLISON Morgan; SARKAR Rajib; WILDES Andrew and ZBIRI Mohamed. (2018). Diffuse magnetic scattering in the frustrated kagomé lattice compound Fe4Si2Sn7O16. Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) doi:10.5291/ILL-DATA.5-32-864
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