Strain-induced spontaneous Hall effect in an epitaxial thin film of a Luttinger semimetal.

Pyrochlore iridates have provided a plethora of novel phenomena owing to the combination of topology and correlation. Among them, much attention has been paid to [Formula: see text], as it is known as a Luttinger semimetal characterized by quadratic band touching at the Brillouin zone center, suggesting that the topology of its electronic states can be tuned by a moderate lattice strain and external magnetic field. Here, we report that our epitaxial [Formula: see text] thin films grown by solid-state epitaxy exhibit a spontaneous Hall effect that persists up to 50 K without having spontaneous magnetization within our experimental accuracy. This indicates that the system breaks the time reversal symmetry at a temperature scale that is too high for the magnetism to be due to Pr 4f moments and must be related to magnetic order of the iridium 5d electrons. Moreover, our analysis finds that the chiral anomaly induces the negative contribution to the magnetoresistance only when a magnetic field and the electric current are parallel to each other. Our results indicate that the strained part of the thin film forms a magnetic Weyl semimetal state.

Phonon thermal Hall effect in a metallic spin ice.

It has become common knowledge that phonons can generate thermal Hall effect in a wide variety of materials, although the underlying mechanism is still controversial. We study longitudinal κxx and transverse κxy thermal conductivity in Pr2Ir2O7, which is a metallic analog of spin ice. Despite the presence of mobile charge carriers, we find that both κxx and κxy are dominated by phonons. A T/H scaling of κxx unambiguously reveals that longitudinal heat current is substantially impeded by resonant scattering of phonons on paramagnetic spins. Upon cooling, the resonant scattering is strongly affected by a development of spin ice correlation and κxx deviates from the scaling in an anisotropic way with respect to field directions. Strikingly, a set of the κxx and κxy data clearly shows that κxy correlates with κxx in its response to magnetic field including a success of the T/H scaling and its failure at low temperature. This remarkable correlation provides solid evidence that an indispensable role is played by spin-phonon scattering not only for hindering the longitudinal heat conduction, but also for generating the transverse response.

Fe-Ni composition dependence of magnetic anisotropy in artificially fabricated L1 0-ordered FeNi films.

We prepared L10-ordered FeNi alloy films by alternate deposition of Fe and Ni monatomic layers, and investigated their magnetic anisotropy. We employed a non-ferromagnetic Au-Cu-Ni buffer layer with a flat surface and good lattice matching to L10-FeNi. An L10-FeNi film grown on Au6Cu51Ni43 showed a large uniaxial magnetic anisotropy energy (Ku = 7.0 × 10(6) erg cm(-)3). Ku monotonically increased with the long-range order parameter (S) of the L10 phase. We investigated the Fe-Ni composition dependence by alternating the deposition of Fe 1 − x and Ni 1 + x monatomic layers (− 0.4 < x < 0.4). Saturation magnetization (Ms) and Ku showed maxima (Ms = 1470 emu cm(-3), Ku = 9.3 × 10(6) erg cm(-3)) for Fe60Ni40 (x = -0.2) while S showed a maximum at the stoichiometric composition (x = 0). The change in the ratio of lattice parameters (c/a) was small for all compositions. We found that enrichment of Fe is very effective to enhance Ku. The large Ms and Ku of Fe60Ni40 indicate that Fe-rich L10-FeNi is promising as a rare-earth-free permanent magnet.