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Direct observation of spin correlations in an artificial triangular lattice Ising spin system with grazing-incidence
Petai Pip1, Artur Glavic2, Sandra Helen Skjærvø3
1Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland. ppip@student.ethz.ch and Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen PSI, Switzerland and Laboratory for Mechanics of Materials and Nanostructures, Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research), 3602 Thun, Switzerland.
Abstract:
The triangular lattice with Ising magnetic moments is an archetypical example of geometric frustration. In the case of dipolar-coupled out-of-plane moments, the geometric frustration results in a disordered classical spin-liquid state at higher temperatures while the system is predicted to transition to an anti-ferromagnetic stripe ground state at low temperatures. In this work we fabricate artificial triangular Ising spin systems without and with uniaxial in-plane compression to tune the nature and temperature of the correlations. We probe the energy scale and nature of magnetic correlations by grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering. In particular, we apply a newly-developed empirical structure-factor model to describe the measured short-range correlated spin-liquid state, and find good agreement with theoretical predictions. We demonstrate that grazing-incidence neutron scattering on our high-quality samples, in conjunction with detailed modeling of the scattering using the Distorted Wave Born Approximation, can be used to experimentally quantify the spin-liquid-like correlations in highly-frustrated artificial spin systems.
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