Published March 4, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Canted antiferromagnetism in a spin-orbit coupled S_(eff) = 3/2 triangular-lattice magnet DyAuGe

  • 1. ROR icon University of Tokyo
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Wako, Japan
  • 4. ROR icon High Energy Accelerator Research Organization
  • 5. ROR icon Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex
  • 6. ROR icon The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI
  • 7. ROR icon University of Tsukuba

Abstract

The exploration of nontrivial magnetic states induced by strong spin-orbit interaction is a central topic of frustrated magnetism. Numerous studies have been conducted on rare-earth-based magnets and 4d/5d transition metal compounds. These are mostly described by an effective spin Seff  = 1/2 for the Kramers doublet of the lowest crystal-electric-field levels. The variety of magnetic orderings can be greatly enhanced when magnetic dipolar moments intertwined with multipolar degrees of freedom, which are described by higher-rank tensors and often require the magnetic ions to have Seff  > 1/2. Here, using synchrotron x-ray diffraction near the Dy L3 edge, we unveil a canted antiferromagnetic ground state arising from a quasi-quartet (Seff  =  3/2) of 4f electrons in a triangular-lattice (TL) rare-earth intermetallics DyAuGe. The magnetic moment and electric-quadrupole moment are closely interlocked and a noncollinear magnetic-dipole alignment is induced by antiferroic electric-quadrupole (AFQ) ordering in the TL layers. The AFQ order is suppressed by an in-plane magnetic field, leading to the metamagnetic transition to a collinear up-up-down magnetic state. These findings offer insights into the emergence of nontrivial magnetic states in frustrated TL systems with Seff > 1/2.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Acknowledgement

T.K. was supported by Ministry of Education Culture Sports Science and Technology (MEXT) Leading Initiative for Excellent Young Researchers (JPMXS0320200135) and Inamori Foundation. This study was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid (No. 21K13874, 20J10988, 23K13068, 22K14010, JP19H05826, 19H01835). The single-crystal x-ray diffraction was performed at SPring-8 with the approval of the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Institute (JASRI) (Proposal No. 2022A1751). The inelastic neutron scattering experiment was performed at the Materials and Life Science Experimental Facility of the J-PARC under a program (Proposal No. 2024S09). The resonant x-ray scattering experiment under a magnetic field was performed at PF under the approval of the Photon Factory Program Advisory Committee (Proposal No. 2022G551 and 2023G093). This work was partly performed using the facilities of the Materials Design and Characterization Laboratory in the Institute for Solid State Physics, the University of Tokyo. The authors thank L. Ye for fruitful discussion, A. Ikeda for generously allowing the use of optical sensing instrument (Hyperion si155, LUNA) for thermal expansion and magnetostriction measurements, and A. Kikkawa for supporting the synthesis of polycrystalline DyAuGe sample for the INS experiment.

Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the Caltech Reserch Data Repository (https://doi.org/10.22002/6581p-82f68).

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Information

Transparent Peer Review file

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Additional details

Identifiers

Funding

Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
JPMXS0320200135
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
21K13874
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
20J10988
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
23K13068
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
22K14010
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
JP19H05826
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
19H01835
Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute
2022A1751
Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex
2024S09
High Energy Accelerator Research Organization
2022G551
High Energy Accelerator Research Organization
2023G093

Dates

Accepted
2025-02-18

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published