Abstract
Magnetic systems are fertile ground for the emergence of exotic states1 when the magnetic interactions cannot be satisfied simultaneously owing to the topology of the lattice—a situation known as geometrical frustration2,3. Spinels, AB2O4, can realize the most highly frustrated network of corner-sharing tetrahedra1,2,3. Several novel states have been discovered in spinels, such as composite spin clusters1 and novel charge-ordered states4,5,6. Here, we use neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering to characterize the fractional magnetization state of HgCr2O4 under an external magnetic field, H. When the field is applied in its Néel ground state, a phase transition occurs at H∼10 T at which each tetrahedron changes from a canted Néel state to a fractional spin state with the total spin, Stet, of S/2 and the lattice undergoes an orthorhombic to cubic symmetry change. Our results provide the microscopic one-to-one correspondence between the spin state and the lattice distortion.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S. Katano for use of the 13.5 T magnet, L. Balents, M. Gingras, K. Kakurai, D. I. Khomskii, K. Penc and H. Takagi for helpful discussions and J.-H. Chung and Y. Shimojo for technical assistance. M.M. is supported by MEXT of Japan and JSPS. Activities at SPINS were partially supported by NSF. S.-H.L. is partially supported by NIST.
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Matsuda, M., Ueda, H., Kikkawa, A. et al. Spin–lattice instability to a fractional magnetization state in the spinel HgCr2O4. Nature Phys 3, 397–400 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys586
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys586
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