Stuffed quantum spin ice
It has been proposed that the prototypical quantum spin ice material Yb2Ti2O7 exhibits a Higgs transition from a magnetic Coulomb liquid to a ferromagnetic phase at Tc ~ 0.21K. However, the situation is complicated, since the magnetic ground state appears to be highly sample dependent. It has recently been proposed that the stuffing of titanium sites by ytterbium ions is responsible for the variation in magnetic properties of nominally stoichiometric samples. We propose to study the low-temperature spin correlations of large single crystals of Yb2(Ti2-xYbx)O7-x/2 stuffed in a controlled manner to compositions of x ~ 0, 0.05 and 0.2. The diffuse magnetic scattering in the spin-flip channel will be measured for each composition using polarised neutrons in a dilution refrigerator at T ~ 0.3K using D7. The transition to the ferromagnetic phase will be studied down to T ~ 0.05K, and a magnetic field of 1T will be applied to give a single domain. Our results will be compared with Monte Carlo simulations based on the defect structures in the stuffed compounds.
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GOFF Jonathan P.; BOWMAN David; CASTELNOVO Claudio; NILSEN Goran and PRABHAKARAN Dharmalingam. (2014). Stuffed quantum spin ice. Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) doi:10.5291/ILL-DATA.5-42-378
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