Observation of a C-type short-range antiferromagnetic order in layer spacing expanded FeS

Meng Wang; Ming Yi; Benjamin A Frandsen; Junjie Yin; Hualei Sun; Zhijun Xu; Huibo Cao; Edith Bourret-Courchesne; Jeffrey W Lynn; Robert J Birgeneau

doi:10.1103/physrevmaterials.4.034802

Observation of a C-type short-range antiferromagnetic order in layer spacing expanded FeS

Phys Rev Mater. 2020;4(3):10.1103/physrevmaterials.4.034802. doi: 10.1103/physrevmaterials.4.034802.

Authors

Meng Wang^{1

2}, Ming Yi^{3

2}, Benjamin A Frandsen^{4

5}, Junjie Yin¹, Hualei Sun¹, Zhijun Xu^{6

7}, Huibo Cao⁸, Edith Bourret-Courchesne⁵, Jeffrey W Lynn⁶, Robert J Birgeneau^{2

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Physics, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510275, China.
² Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602, USA.
⁵ Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
⁶ NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA.
⁷ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
⁸ Neutron Scattering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.

Abstract

We report neutron diffraction studies of FeS single crystals obtained from Rb _x Fe_2-y S₂ single crystals via a hydrothermal method. While no $\sqrt{5} \times \sqrt{5}$ iron vacancy order or block antiferromagnetic order typical of Rb _x Fe_2-y S₂ is found in our samples, we observe C-type short-range antiferromagnetic order with moments pointed along the c axis hosted by a different phase of FeS with an expanded interlayer spacing. The Néel temperature for this magnetic order is determined to be 170 ± 4 K. Our finding of a variant FeS structure hosting this C-type antiferromagnetic order demonstrates that the known FeS phase synthesized in this method is in the vicinity of a magnetically ordered ground state, providing insights into understanding a variety of phenomena observed in FeS and the related FeSe_1-x S _x iron chalcogenide system.

Grants and funding

9999-NIST/ImNIST/Intramural NIST DOC/United States