Single Crystal Growth and Magnetic-Thermal Characterization of a Rare-Earth Based Breathing Pyrochlore Family

The Breathing Pyrochlore (BP) lattice, which consists of three dimensionally corner sharing tetrahedra with alternating sizes, has recently attracted much attention due to presence of frustrated or competing interactions. BP system has also been proposed to host of many intriguing phenomena such as Quantum Spin Liquid, Quantum Spin Ice and Weyl magnons, due to anisotropic spin-spin interactions [1-3]. Large and high quality single crystals of BP compounds are highly needed, in order to advance these hypotheses experimentally. We have successfully grown single crystals of a rare-earth BP family, using the uniquely modified travelling solvent floating zone techniques. Additionally, we have performed specific heat, thermal conductivity, AC /DC magnetic susceptibility, magnetization, magneto-dielectric, μSR and X-ray diffraction measurements to probe the physical properties of these new compounds. In this talk I will present the results of our single crystal growth and characterization efforts.

References:
[1] Li, Fei-Ye, et al. Nature communications 7, 12691 (2016).
[2] Savary, Lucile, et al. Physical Review B 94, 075146 (2016).
[3] Yan, Han, et al. arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.10934 (2019).