Abstract
Magnetic frustration and low dimensionality can prevent long-range magnetic order and lead to exotic correlated ground states. consists of magnetic ions forming magnetically frustrated zigzag chains along the axis and shows no long-range order to temperatures as low as mK. We carried out neutron scattering and ac magnetic susceptibility measurements using powder and single crystals of . Diffuse neutron scattering indicates strong one-dimensional (1D) magnetic correlations along the chain direction that can be qualitatively accounted for by the axial next-nearest-neighbor Ising model with nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor exchange meV and meV, respectively. Three-dimensional (3D) correlations become important below K. At mK, the short-range correlations are characterized by a putative propagation vector . We argue that the absence of long-range order arises from the presence of slowly decaying 1D domain walls that are trapped due to 3D correlations. This stabilizes a low-temperature phase without long-range magnetic order, but with well-ordered chain segments separated by slowly moving domain walls.
7 More- Received 8 February 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.95.134430
©2017 American Physical Society