Magnetic Excitations in an Itinerant Ferromagnet near Quantum Criticality

Abstract

We determine the initial temperature dependence of the exchange splitting Delta(T) in the weak itinerant ferromagnet ZrZn2 (T{C}=28 K) using the de Haas-van Alphen effect. There is a large decrease in Delta with temperature in the range 0.5< or =T< or =4 K. A comparison of Delta(T) with the magnetization M(T) shows that the dominant process responsible for the reduction of M is not the thermal excitation of spin waves, but a repopulation of the spin- upward arrow and spin- downward arrow Fermi surfaces. This contrasts with the behavior in Fe where there is no observable change in Delta and the thermal excitation of spin waves is the only observable spin-flipping process at low temperatures.