Abstract
The rare-earth tetraborides are exceptional in that the rare-earth ions are topologically equivalent to the frustrated Shastry-Sutherland lattice. In this paper, we report the growth of large single crystals of RB 4 (where R = Nd, Gd → Tm, and Y) by the floating-zone method, using a high-power xenon arc-lamp furnace. The crystal boules have been characterized and tested for their quality using X-ray diffraction techniques and temperature- and field-dependent magnetization and AC resistivity measurements.
Highlights
The inability of a system to minimize the competing magnetic interactions due to crystal structure is termed geometric frustration
One model of a geometrically frustrated magnet is the Shastry-Sutherland lattice (SSL) [5,6], which is an example of a frustrated network with an exact ground-state solution
We describe the growth of large single crystals of the majority of the rare-earth tetraborides RB4 by the floating-zone technique using high-power xenon arc lamps
Summary
The inability of a system to minimize the competing magnetic interactions due to crystal structure is termed geometric frustration. This leads to a large ground-state degeneracy, suppressing long-range magnetic order and in many cases gives rise to unusual intermediate magnetic states with a complex arrangement of magnetic moments [1]. The SSL only has a handful of experimental realizations, the most notable being SrCu2 (BO3 )2 [7,8], where the Cu ions form a sublattice that is equivalent to the SSL This has given a chance to investigate the SSL in the quantum limit [5]. The rare-earth tetraboride-class of materials [10] has attracted a great deal of theoretical and experimental attention, due to the fact that the relatively large magnetic moment of rare-earth ions provides the possibility to investigate the SSL in the classical limit [5]
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