Quasi-static remanence as a generic-feature of spin-canting in Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction driven...

We consistently observe a unique pattern in remanence in a number of canted-antiferromagnets (AFM) and piezomagnets (PzM). A part of the remanence isquasi-staticin nature and vanishes above a critical magnetic field. The present work is devoted to exploring thisquasi-staticremanence (μ) in a series of prototypical canted-AFM ACO3(A= Co, Ni, Mn) with progressively increasing Néel temperature (TN). The samples in the form of pressed pellets contain individual crystallites that are well-formed polyhedra in themesoscopicsize range. Comprehensive investigation of remanence as a function ofmagnetic fieldandtimein ACO3reveals that the magnitude ofμincreases with decreasingTN, but the stability with time is higher in the samples with higherTN. Further to this, all three carbonates exhibit a universal scaling inμ, which relates to the concurrent phenomenon of PzM. Overall, these data not only establish that the observation ofquasi-staticremanence withcounter-intuitivemagnetic-field dependence can serve as a foot-print for spin-canted systems, but also confirm that simple remanence measurements, using SQUID magnetometry, can provide insights about the extent of spin canting-a non-trivial parameter to determine. In addition, these data suggest that the functional form ofμwithmagnetic-fieldandtimemay hold the key to isolating Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction-driven spin-canted systems from single-ion anisotropy-driven ones. We also demonstrate the existence ofμby tracking specific peaks in neutron diffraction data, acquired in the remnant state in CoCO3.