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Multiple field-induced phase transitions in the geometrically frustrated dipolar magnet: Gd(2) Ti(2)O(7)
A P Ramirez1, B S Shastry, A Hayashi
1Los Alamos National Laboratory, K764, New Mexico 87545, USA.
Physical Review Letters
|August 23, 2002
Abstract:
Field-driven phase transitions generally arise from competition between Zeeman energy and exchange or crystal-field anisotropy. Here we present the phase diagram of a frustrated pyrochlore magnet Gd(2)Ti(2)O(7), where crystal-field splitting is small compared to the dipolar energy. We find good agreement between zero-temperature critical fields and those obtained from a mean-field model. Here, dipolar interactions couple real space and spin space, so the transitions in Gd(2)Ti(2)O(7) arise from field-induced "cooperative anisotropy," reflecting the broken spatial symmetries of the pyrochlore lattice.