Abstract
Magnetic dilution of a well-established Kitaev candidate system is realized in the substitutional series . Optimized syntheses protocols yield uniformly doped single crystals and polycrystalline powders that are isostructural to the parental as per x-ray diffraction. The Rh content is accurately determined by the quantitative energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy technique with standards. We determine the magnetic phase diagram of for in-plane magnetic fields from magnetization and specific-heat measurements as a function of and stacking periodicity and identify the suppression of the magnetic order at towards a disordered phase, which does not show any clear signature of freezing into a spin glass. Comparing with previous studies on the substitution series , we propose that chemical pressure would contribute to the suppression of magnetic order, especially in , and that the zigzag magnetic ground state appears to be relatively robust with respect to the dilution of the Kitaev--Heisenberg magnetic lattice. We also discovered a slight dependence of the magnetic properties on thermal cycling, which would be due to an incomplete structural transition.
5 More- Received 3 July 2022
- Accepted 10 October 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.6.114403
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