Abstract
Temperature dependent neutron powder diffraction measurements have been performed on the ternary rare-earth alloy Ho1/3Tb1/3Er1/3. A dominant hexagonal closed packed structure is found, with a surface impurity phase that does not have any discernible magnetic signal. Three different magnetic phase transitions have been identified in the sample: (1) paramagnetic to helical k = (0,0,0.18) near T1 = 90 K, (2) addition of another helix k = (0,0,0.34) near T2 = 70 K, and (3) onset of ferromagnetism near T3 = 45 K. There is a degree of ambiguity in the direction of the ferromagnetic moments, but we argue that a c-axis ferromagnetic moment is most plausible. At T = 3.5 K the magnetic moments are found to be mc = 2.83 μB, mab[kc = 0.19] = 3.96 μB, and mab[kc = 0.37] = 3.17 μB.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 315-322 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials |
| Volume | 469 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2019 |
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract number DE-AC05-00OR22725. The work at Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ High Flux Isotope Reactor was supported by the United States Department of Energy (US-DOE), Office of Science – Basic Energy Science (BES), Scientific User Facilities Division. This research was supported in part (for KJO) by an appointment to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory HERE Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. The XRD measurement was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. DMP acknowledges technical assistance from Jong Keum and Andrew Payzant with the low-temperature XRD stage. DMP acknowledges discussions about the HB-2A details with Stuart Calder, and discussions about the magnetic diffraction analysis with Keith Taddei and Ovidiu Garlea. This research was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51671018 , 51531001 , 51422101 , 51371003 and 51671021 ), and YW acknowledges the financial support from the Top-Notch Young Talents Program and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities .