Quasi–static remanence as a generic-feature of spin-canting in Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction driven canted-antiferromagnets

Abstract We consistently observe a unique pattern in remanence in a number of canted-antiferromagnets (AFM) and piezomagnets (PzM). A part of the remanence is quasi–static in nature and vanishes above a critical magnetic field. The present work is devoted to exploring this quasi–static remanence ( μ ) in a series of prototypical canted-AFM ACO 3 ( A = Co, Ni, Mn) with progressively increasing Néel temperature ( T N ). The samples in the form of pressed pellets contain individual crystallites that are well-formed polyhedra in the mesoscopic size range. Comprehensive investigation of remanence as a function of magnetic field and time in ACO 3 reveals that the magnitude of μ increases with decreasing T N , but the stability with time is higher in the samples with higher T N . Further to this, all three carbonates exhibit a universal scaling in μ , which relates to the concurrent phenomenon of PzM. Overall, these data not only establish that the observation of quasi–static remanence with counter-intuitive magnetic-field dependence can serve as a foot-print for spin-canted systems, but also confirm that simple remanence measurements, using SQUID magnetometry, can provide insights about the extent of spin canting—a non-trivial parameter to determine. In addition, these data suggest that the functional form of μ with magnetic-field and time may hold the key to isolating Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction-driven spin-canted systems from single-ion anisotropy-driven ones. We also demonstrate the existence of μ by tracking specific peaks in neutron diffraction data, acquired in the remnant state in CoCO 3 .