Observation of a $C$-type short-range antiferromagnetic order in layer spacing expanded FeS

Observation of a $C$ -type short-range antiferromagnetic order in layer spacing expanded FeS

Meng Wang, Ming Yi, Benjamin A. Frandsen, Junjie Yin, Hualei Sun, Zhijun Xu, Huibo Cao, Edith Bourret-Courchesne, Jeffrey W. Lynn, and Robert J. Birgeneau

Phys. Rev. Materials 4, 034802 – Published 9 March 2020

Abstract

We report neutron diffraction studies of FeS single crystals obtained from ${Rb}_{x} {Fe}_{2 - y} S_{2}$ single crystals via a hydrothermal method. While no $\sqrt{5} \times \sqrt{5}$ iron vacancy order or block antiferromagnetic order typical of ${Rb}_{x} {Fe}_{2 - y} S_{2}$ is found in our samples, we observe $C$ -type short-range antiferromagnetic order with moments pointed along the $c$ axis hosted by a different phase of FeS with an expanded interlayer spacing. The Néel temperature for this magnetic order is determined to be $170 \pm 4$ K. Our finding of a variant FeS structure hosting this $C$ -type antiferromagnetic order demonstrates that the known FeS phase synthesized in this method is in the vicinity of a magnetically ordered ground state, providing insights into understanding a variety of phenomena observed in FeS and the related ${FeSe}_{1 - x} S_{x}$ iron chalcogenide system.

Received 5 September 2019
Revised 17 February 2020
Accepted 21 February 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.4.034802

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Antiferromagnetism Magnetic susceptibility Superconductivity

Antiferromagnets Iron-based superconductors

Neutron diffraction Susceptibility measurements

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Meng Wang ^1,2,*, Ming Yi^3,2,†, Benjamin A. Frandsen^4,5, Junjie Yin¹, Hualei Sun¹, Zhijun Xu ^6,7, Huibo Cao⁸, Edith Bourret-Courchesne⁵, Jeffrey W. Lynn ⁶, and Robert J. Birgeneau^2,5

¹School of Physics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510275, China
²Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
³Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA
⁴Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA
⁵Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁶NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA
⁷Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
⁸Neutron Scattering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA

^*wangmeng5@mail.sysu.edu.cn
^†mingyi@rice.edu

Article Text (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

References (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

Issue

Vol. 4, Iss. 3 — March 2020

Reuse & Permissions

Access Options

Article Available via CHORUS

Download Accepted Manuscript

Author publication services for translation and copyediting assistance advertisement

Images

Figure 1
Proposed $C$ -type AF order with moments aligned along the $c$ axis for expanded FeS. The distance between two iron layers of the expanded FeS is 5.92 Å in between 5.09 Å for that of reported FeS and 6.95 Å for that of ${Rb}_{x} {Fe}_{2 - y} S_{2}$ .
Reuse & Permissions
Figure 2
(a) XRD measurement on powder samples of FeS at room temperature. The solid line is a Rietveld refinement profile with the commonly observed lattice constants $a = b = 3.68 Å$ and $c = 5.09 Å$ . (b) X-ray diffraction pattern of a FeS single crystal showing nuclear reflection peaks of $Q = (0, 0, L), L = 1$ , 2, 3, and 4. In addition to the main peak of $Q = (0, 0, 1)$ at $17 . 52^{\circ}$ , a broad peak at $14 . 96^{\circ}$ and a weak peak at $21 . 73^{\circ}$ exist. The lines are fits to a Gaussian function throughout this paper.
Reuse & Permissions
Figure 3
(a) Rocking curve scans of a nuclear peak at $Q = (1, 1, 0), T = 2.4$ and 230 K, respectively. (b) The lattice constant $a$ in units of Å translated from $θ − 2 θ$ scans at $Q = (1, 1, 0), T = 2.4$ and 230 K. (c) Similar rocking curve scans at $Q = (0, 0, 1)$ and (d) the lattice constant $c$ translated from $θ − 2 θ$ scans at $Q = (0, 0, 1)$ . Identical scans at 2.4 and 230 K reveal that no significant structural deformation occurs at 230 K. The error bars stand for one standard deviation of the measured counts throughout this paper.
Reuse & Permissions
Figure 4
Magnetic susceptibility measurements for a sample weighing 5.6 mg with fields of (a) $H = 500$ , (b) 1000, and (c) 5000 Oe parallel to the $a b$ plane and the $c$ axis of FeS. A drop presents at 4 K on susceptibility with ZFC $(H ∥ a b)$ and $H = 500$ Oe. ZFC is zero-field cooling. FC is field cooling.
Reuse & Permissions
Figure 5
(a) Magnetic Bragg peak scans along the $[H, H]$ direction at $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 0)$ , (b) $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 0.5)$ , and (c) $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 1)$ at 2.4, 230, and 270 K. (d) Rocking curve scans at $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 0)$ and (e) $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 0.5)$ . (f)–(j) Intensity differences between 2.4 and 230 K corresponding to the scans in (a)–(e). The counts are normalized from data collected for 2 or 3 min per point for statistics.
Reuse & Permissions
Figure 6
(a) A scan along the $(0.5, 0.5, L)$ direction from $L = - 1.75$ to 1.75 at 2.4 K and a similar scan from $L = 0$ to 1.75 at 230 K. (b) Intensity differences between 2.4 and 230 K of the scans along the $(0.5, 0.5, L)$ direction. The blue curve is a guide simulated by a Lorentz function. The solid and dashed red curves are the squared structure factors corresponding to moments aligned along the $c$ axis or in the $a b$ plane, respectively. The structure factors have included the effects of the magnetic form factor, moment direction, and twinning. (c) Magnetic order parameters measured at $Q = (0.5, 0.5, 0)$ , yielding a Néel temperature at $T_{N} \approx 170$ K. The solid curve is a fit to a simple power-law dependence $ϕ {(T)}^{2} \propto {(1 - T / T_{N})}^{2 β}$ .
Reuse & Permissions

Physical Review Materials