Determining the magnetic ground state of TbNi5 single crystal using polarized neutron scattering technique

Abstract

The TbNi5 compound shows an interesting magnetic phase transition with an incommensurate structure below 23K, whose true nature remains unresolved. In order to solve this question, we have carried out polarized neutron diffraction experiments by measuring temperature and field dependence of the intensities of satellites and Bragg reflections. From the temperature dependence of both satellite peaks and Bragg reflection, we demonstrated that it has only one magnetic structure at a given temperature. Furthermore, unlike previous reports, we found that both ferromagnetic and modulated components of the Tb ion magnetic moments should be collinear to each other. Our data also show strong depolarisation effects that are most likely to arise from domain structure of ferromagnetic component. A critical field, which destroyers a modulated magnetic structure is found to be lower than a field value to saturate the ferromagnetic component, in which the intensity of Bragg ferromagnetic reflections reaches saturation.