Single Crystal Growth and Magnetic/Thermal Characterization of Breathing Pyrochlores

Breathing Pyrochlore (BP) has recently become one of the most popular spin frustrated systems, due to its alternating array of different size tetrahedra, which results in breaking inversion symmetry of the lattice sites. Despite great interests, very few real-world BP systems have been reported. Moreover, so far all the reported compounds have been limited to powder samples. Similar to conventional pyrochlore systems, having access to single crystal samples of BP would play a key role in understanding the underlying physics of frustrated magnetism and associated exotic phases. To that end, recently we have successfully grown large high quality single crystals of two different classes of BP systems. In this talk we present the modified and improved floating zone furnace technique developed, and discuss the magnetic and thermal characterization results for single crystals of BP compounds Ba3Yb2Zn5O11 and LiGaCr4O8.