The results are reported of magnetic field-dependent neutron diffraction experiments on polycrystalline inert-gas condensed holmium with a nanometre crystallite size (D = 33â nm). At T = 50â K, no evidence is found for the existence of helifan(3/2) or helifan(2) structures for the nanocrystalline sample, in contrast with results reported in the literature for the single crystal. Instead, when the applied field H is increased, the helix pattern transforms progressively, most likely into a fan structure. It is the component of H which acts on the basal-plane spins of a given nanocrystallite that drives the disappearance of the helix; for nanocrystalline Ho, this field is about 1.3â T, and it is related to a characteristic kink in the virgin magnetization curve. For a coarse-grained Ho sample, concomitant with the destruction of the helix phase, the emergence of an unusual angular anisotropy (streak pattern) and the appearance of novel spin structures are observed.
A neutron study of nanocrystalline terbium (Balaji G et al 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 227202) has shown that the randomly oriented anisotropy of the paramagnetic susceptibility tensor may lead to strongly correlated nanoscale spin disorder in the paramagnetic state which can be probed very effectively by magnetic small-angle neutron scattering (SANS). In principle, this scenario is also applicable to other rare-earth metals and the size of the effect is expected to scale with the strength of the anisotropy in the paramagnetic state. Here, we report SANS results (in the paramagnetic state) on nanocrystalline inert-gas condensed samples of Gd and Ho, which represent the cases of low and high anisotropy, respectively.
