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Updated: Jan 20, 2026
Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals
Published on: August 15, 2018
Crystal Growth and Magnetic Properties of Topological Nodal-Line Semimetal GdSbTe with Antiferromagnetic Spin
Raman Sankar1,2, I Panneer Muthuselvam3, K Ramesh Babu4,5
1Institute of Physics , Academia Sinica , Taipei 10617 , Taiwan.
Abstract:
We report crystal growth, AC and DC magnetic susceptibilities [χ(T, H)], magnetization [M(T, H)], and heat capacity [C(T, H)] measurement results of GdSbTe single crystal. GdSbTe is isostructural to the confirmed nonmagnetic nodal-line semimetal ZrSiS of noncentrosymmetric tetragonal crystal structure in space group P4/nmm (No. 129), but it shows additional long-range antiferromagnetic spin ordering for the Gd spins of S = 7/2 below TN. Both χ(T, H) and C(T, H) measurements confirm the existence of a long-range antiferromagnetic (AFM) spin ordering of Gd spins below T ∼ 12 K, and an additional spin reorientation/recovery (sr) behavior is identified from the change of on-site spin anisotropy between T ∼ 7 and T ∼ 4 K. The anisotropic magnetic susceptibilities of χ(T, H) below T clearly demonstrate that the AFM long-range spin ordering of GdSbTe has an easy axis parallel to the ab-plane direction. The field- and orientation-dependent magnetization of M(T, H) at 2 K shows two plateaus to indicate the spin-flop transition for H||ab near ∼2.1 T and a metamagnetic state near ∼5.9 T having ∼1/3 of the fully polarized magnetization by the applied field. The heat capacity measurement results yield Sommerfeld coefficient of γ ∼ 7.6(4) mJ/mol K2 and θD ∼ 195(2) K being less than half of that for the nonmagnetic ZrSiS. A three-dimensional (3D) AFM spin structure is supported by the ab initio calculations for Gd having magnetic moment of 7.1 μB and the calculated AFM band structure indicates that GdSbTe is a semimetal with bare density of states (0.36 states/eV fu) at the Fermi level, which is 10 times smaller than the measured one to suggest strong spin-fluctuation.
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