Spin glass state and enhanced spiral phase in doped delafossite oxide CuCrO2

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to explore how doping affects magnetic states in CuCrO2, revealing the emergence of spin glass states and enhanced spiral phases due to disorder and quantum fluctuations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of doping effects on magnetic phases in CuCrO2, linking disorder and quantum fluctuations to experimental observations.

Findings

Disorder from V/Al doping contributes to spin glass state.

Mg2+ hole doping enhances spiral phase via quantum fluctuations.

Simulations reproduce several experimental magnetic behaviors.

Abstract

In this work, we study the doping effects on the magnetic states of CuCrO2 based on the classical frustrated spin model [Lin et al., Phys. Rev. B 89, 220405(R) (2014)]. Several experimental observations can be well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulations of the modified spin models. Our work suggests that the disorder induced by V/Al doping cooperated with the frustration in the system may contribute to the emergence of the spin glass state. Furthermore, the hole-doping by Mg2+ substituting Cr3+ enhances the quantum fluctuations and bond disorder which modulate the biquadratic exchanges, and in turn results in the promotion of the spiral phase, consistent with the experimental report.