Thermal studies of the spin liquid state and analog to the 4He melting curve in a geometrically frustrated magnet

Abstract

Gadolinium gallium garnet, Gd 3Ga 5O 12 (GGG) has an extraordinary low-temperature phase diagram. Although the Curie–Weiss temperature of GGG is ∼−2 K, GGG shows no long-range order down to T∼0.4 K. At low temperatures GGG has a spin glass phase at low fields (≲0.1 T), a field-induced long-range ordered antiferromagnetic state at fields of between 0.7 and 1.3 T, and, at intermediate fields, an apparent spin-liquid state without long-range order. We have characterized the intermediate field (IF) state through heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and magnetocaloric measurements. Our results show a sharp high-field phase boundary of the thermal irreversibility of the spin glass phase of GGG implying that the intermediate field phase is distinct from the spin glass. The lower field boundary of the AFM phase is shown to have distinct minimum at T∼0.2 K, in analogy to the minimum in the melting curve of 4He. The existence of such a minimum is confirmed by measurements of the latent heat of the transition below that temperature.