Quasi-Static Remanence as a generic-feature of spin-canting in Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction driven canted-antiferromagnets

Abstract

We consistently observe a unique pattern in remanence in a number of cantedantiferromagnets (AFM) and piezomagnets (PzM). A part of the remanence is quasi-static in nature and vanishes above a critical magnetic field. Present work is devoted to exploring this quasi-static remanence (µ) in a series of prototypical canted-AFM ACO 3 (A = Co, Ni, Mn) with progressively increasing Néel temperature (T N ). The samples in the form of pressed pellet contain individual crystallites that are well-formed polyhedra in the mesoscopic size range. Comprehensive investigation of remanence as a function of magnetic-field and time in ACO 3 reveals that the magnitude of µ increases with decreasing T N , but the stability with time is higher in the samples with higher T N . Further to this, all three carbonates exhibit a universal scaling in µ, which relates to the concurrent phenomenon of piezomagnetism. Overall, these data not only establish that the observation of quasi-static remanence with counter-intuitive magnetic-field dependence can serve as a foot-print for spin-canted systems, but also confirms that simple remanence measurements, using SQUID magnetometry, can provide insights about the extent of spin canting -a non trivial parameter to determine. In addition, these data suggest that the functional form of µ with magnetic-field and time may hold key to isolate Dzyaloshinskii Moriya Interaction driven spin-canted systems from Single Ion Anisotropy driven ones. We also demonstrate the existence of µ by tracking specific peaks in neutron diffraction data, acquired in remnant state in CoCO 3 .