Crystal Growth and Magnetic Properties of Topological Nodal-Line Semimetal GdSbTe with Antiferromagnetic Spin Ordering

Abstract

We report crystal growth, AC and DC magnetic susceptibilities [χ(T, H)], magnetization [M(T, H)], and heat capacity [C P (T, H)] measurement results of GdSbTe single crystal. GdSbTe is isostructural to the confirmed nonmagnetic nodal-line semimetal ZrSiS of noncentrosymmetric tetragonal crystal structure in space group P4/nmm (No. 129), but it shows additional long-range antiferromagnetic spin ordering for the Gd spins of S = 7 / 2 below T N . Both χ(T, H) and C P (T, H) measurements confirm the existence of a long-range antiferromagnetic (AFM) spin ordering of Gd spins below T N ∼ 12 K, and an additional spin reorientation/recovery (sr) behavior is identified from the change of on-site spin anisotropy between T sr1 ∼ 7 and T sr2 ∼ 4 K. The anisotropic magnetic susceptibilities of χ(T, H) below T N clearly demonstrate that the AFM long-range spin ordering of GdSbTe has an easy axis parallel to the ab-plane direction. The fieldand orientation-dependent magnetization of M(T, H) at 2 K shows two plateaus to indicate the spin-flop transition for H||ab near ∼2.1 T and a metamagnetic state near ∼5.9 T having ∼ 1 / 3 of the fully polarized magnetization by the applied field. The heat capacity measurement results yield Sommerfeld coefficient of γ ∼ 7.6(4) mJ/mol K 2 and θ D ∼ 195(2) K being less than half of that for the nonmagnetic ZrSiS. A three-dimensional (3D) AFM spin structure is supported by the ab initio calculations for Gd having magnetic moment of 7.1 μ B and the calculated AFM band structure indicates that GdSbTe is a semimetal with bare density of states (0.36 states/eV fu) at the Fermi level, which is 10 times smaller than the measured one to suggest strong spin-fluctuation.

Band Engineering of Dirac Semimetals Using Charge Density Waves

“…[25] In this context, LnSbTe materials (Ln = lanthanide) that are isostructural and isoelectronic to ZrSiS have been suggested as promising candidates as magnetic TSMs. [28][29][30][31][32][33] However, the band structure of these materials is not as "clean" as in ZrSiS: the FS contains trivial pockets, in addition to the nodal-line states.…”

Electronic and magnetic properties of the topological semimetal candidate NdSbTe

“…While the square net planes formed by Group-IV elements (Si, Ge, and Sn) play an essential role in generating the topologically non-trivial bands in the above mentioned materials, the Sb (Group-V) network can also supports topological fermions in the related compound of this family, LnSbTe (Ln = Lanthanide rare earth). Thus far, only a few LnSbTe compounds have been studied [22,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. The orthorhombically distorted non-magnetic LaSbTe has been suggested to be a topological insulator [22,36], and a topological nodal-line in GdSbTe has been observed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) [38].…”

“…Furthermore, the rich magnetic phases of CeSbTe, which originate from the 4f-magnetism of Ce, have led to predictions of Dirac and time-reversal breaking Weyl states tunable by temperature and magnetic field [37]. Given the rich magnetic properties [35,[39][40][41] and large material pool available by varying Ln, this lessexplored LnSbTe-family provides a rare platform for investigating the interplay between magnetism and electronic band topology.…”

Various Nodal Lines in P63/mmc-type TiTe Topological Metal and its (001) Surface State

“…Topological materials (TMs) ( Cava et al, 2013 ; Kong and Cui, 2011 ; Xu et al, 2015 ; Strambini et al, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2017 ; Banik et al, 2018 ; Kageyama et al, 2018 ; Schoop et al, 2018 ; Culcer et al, 2020 ; Kumar et al, 2020 ; Li and Xia, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020 ) enjoy nontrivial band-crossings (BCs) in their low-energy region, giving rise to novel fermionic excitations. A series of TMs, including nodal-point ( Alcón et al, 2017 ; Fu et al, 2018a ; Kong et al, 2018 ; Jin et al, 2019a ; Jin et al, 2019b ; Wang et al, 2019 ; Fang et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ), nodal-line ( Chen et al, 2018 ; Zhou et al, 2018 ; Li et al, 2019 ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Sankar et al, 2019 ; Tang et al, 2019 ; Xu et al, 2019 ; Yi et al, 2019 ; Wang et al, 2020a ; Zhao et al, 2020 ), and nodal-surface ( Wu et al, 2018 ; Qie et al, 2019 ; Wang et al, 2020b ) materials, have been predicted via symmetry and first-principle analysis. Some of them have been verified via experiment.…”