Magnetic frustration in metals is scarce and hard to pinpoint, but exciting due to the possibility of the emergence of fascinating novel phases. The cubic intermetallic compound HoInCu4 with all holmium atoms on an fcc lattice, exhibits partial magnetic frustration, yielding a ground state where half of the Ho moments remain without long-range order, as evidenced by our neutron scattering experiments. The substitution of In with Cd results in HoCdCu4 in a full breakdown of magnetic frustration. Consequently we found a fully ordered magnetic structure in our neutron diffraction experiments. These findings are in agreement with the local energy scales and crystal electric field excitations, which we determined from specific heat and inelastic neutron scattering data. The electronic density of states for the itinerant bands acts as tuning parameter for the ratio between nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor interactions and thus for magnetic frustration.
@article{arxiv.1907.09885,
title = {Magnetic frustration in a metallic fcc lattice},
author = {Oliver Stockert and Jens-Uwe Hoffmann and Martin Mühlbauer and Anatoliy Senyshyn and Michael M. Koza and Alexander A. Tsirlin and F. Maximilian Wolf and Sebastian Bachus and Philipp Gegenwart and Roman Movshovich and Svilen Bobev and Veronika Fritsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.09885},
year = {2020}
}