Magnetic study of low-temperature phase of

✍ Scribed by Maria Bałanda; Andrzej Szytuła

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 681 KB
• Volume: 150
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-1098
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ssc.2010.03.002

✦ Synopsis

Magnetization and phase sensitive AC susceptibility was measured for the annealed and as-cast samples of ferromagnetic UCu 2 Ge 2 , T C = 107 K. Special attention was paid to the low temperature range, T < 50 K, which is interesting due to the magnetization decrease and frozen AC response. The hysteresis loops showed a remanence of ≈87% and a fast, thermally activated decrease in the coercivity field. Thermoremanent magnetization at 4.3 K decayed with the relaxation time ≈1 * 10 3 s. The strong increase of the χ AC with the amplitude of the driving field was observed. All these results point to a very large anisotropy of the compound at the lowest temperatures. Phase transition to the randomly canted ferromagnetic phase at T ≈ 55 K was detected in the measurement of the third order non-linear susceptibility. It is concluded that the origin of the transition is the strong temperature dependence of magnetic anisotropy.