Magnetic order tuned by Cu substitution in Fe1.1-zCuzTe

TL;DR

This study investigates how Cu substitution affects the structural and magnetic properties of Fe1.1Te, revealing suppression of transitions and emergence of spin glass and incommensurate magnetic order, highlighting Cu's significant impact on magnetic correlations.

Contribution

It provides detailed neutron scattering analysis of Cu-doped Fe1.1Te, showing how Cu induces incommensurate order and spin glass behavior, which was not previously characterized.

Findings

Structural and magnetic transitions are suppressed with Cu doping.

At 10% Cu, the system becomes a spin glass below 22 K.

Incommensurate magnetic order appears and transitions to nearly commensurate order at lower temperatures.

Abstract

We study the effects of Cu substitution in Fe1.1Te, the non-superconducting parent compound of the iron-based superconductor, Fe1+yTe1-xSex, utilizing neutron scattering techniques. It is found that the structural and magnetic transitions, which occur at \sim 60 K without Cu, are monotonically depressed with increasing Cu content. By 10% Cu for Fe, the structural transition is hardly detectable, and the system becomes a spin glass below 22 K, with a slightly incommensurate ordering wave vector of (0.5-d, 0, 0.5) with d being the incommensurability of 0.02, and correlation length of 12 angstrom along the a axis and 9 angstrom along the c axis. With 4% Cu, both transition temperatures are at 41 K, though short-range incommensurate order at (0.42, 0, 0.5) is present at 60 K. With further cooling, the incommensurability decreases linearly with temperature down to 37 K, below which there is a first order transition to a long-range almost-commensurate antiferromagnetic structure. A spin anisotropy gap of 4.5 meV is also observed in this compound. Our results show that the weakly magnetic Cu has large effects on the magnetic correlations; it is suggested that this is caused by the frustration of the exchange interactions between the coupled Fe spins.