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Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 247201 (2004) [4 pages]

Competing Magnetic Phases on a Kagomé Staircase
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G. Lawes1, M. Kenzelmann2,3, N. Rogado4, K. H. Kim1 *, G. A. Jorge1, R. J. Cava4, A. Aharony5, O. Entin-Wohlman5, A. B. Harris6, T. Yildirim3, Q. Z. Huang3, S. Park3,7 †, C. Broholm2,3, and A. P. Ramirez1,8
1Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
3NIST Center for Neutron Research, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA
4Department of Chemistry and Princeton Materials Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
5School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
6Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
7Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
8Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA

Received 12 July 2004; published 7 December 2004

We present thermodynamic and neutron data on Ni3V2O8, a spin-1 system on a kagomé staircase. The extreme degeneracy of the kagomé antiferromagnet is lifted to produce two incommensurate phases at finite T—one amplitude modulated, the other helical—plus a commensurate canted antiferromagnet for T→0. The H-T phase diagram is described by a model of competing first and second neighbor interactions with smaller anisotropic terms. Ni3V2O8 thus provides an elegant example of order from subleading interactions in a highly frustrated system.


©2004 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v93/e247201
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.247201
PACS: 75.10.Jm, 75.25.+z, 75.30.Kz

* CSCMR & School of Physics, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-747, S. Korea.
† HANARO Center, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Daejeon, S. Korea.

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