Magnetic properties of hexagonal YbFeO3 thin film
Abstract
We have synthesized epitaxial single crystal thin films of multiferroic hexagonal YbFeO3 (0001) on YSZ (111) substrates using Pulsed Laser Deposition. In-plane XRD and RHEED study confirms the existence of six-fold symmetry in YbFeO3 thin films, consistent with the proposed hexagonal structure. The epitaxial orientation is found to be h-YbFeO3\ (100)||YSZ(11-2). We have studied magnetic properties of h-YbFeO3/YSZ thin films using SQUID, neutron diffraction and X-ray Circular Magnetic Dichroism (XMCD). SQUID study of h-YbFeO3/YSZ thin films show emergence of out-of-plane magnetic moment at 140 K, possibly due to spin canting resulting from Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. This ferromagnetic transition is consistent with our temperature dependent neutron diffraction study where appearance of the forbidden (purely magnetic) (101) peak marks a magnetic transition around 150 K while the intensity of the nuclear (144) peak remains unaltered. In addition, SQUID and XMCD studies at low temperatures clearly indicate that Yb3+ ions carry a much lower magnetic moment than the previously reported values.
This research used CORELLI beamline at SNS, ORNL. The project was supported by the NSF, DMR under Award DMR-1454618.- Publication:
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APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017APS..MARF43004S