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Magnetic imaging of a supercooling glass transition in a weakly disordered ferromagnet

Abstract

Spin glasses are founded in the frustration and randomness of microscopic magnetic interactions. They are non-ergodic systems where replica symmetry is broken. Although magnetic glassy behaviour has been observed in many colossal magnetoresistive manganites, there is no consensus that they are spin glasses. Here, an intriguing glass transition in (La,Pr,Ca)MnO3 is imaged using a variable-temperature magnetic force microscope. In contrast to the speculated spin-glass picture, our results show that the observed static magnetic configuration seen below the glass-transition temperature arises from the cooperative freezing of the first-order antiferromagnetic (charge ordered) to ferromagnetic transition. Our data also suggest that accommodation strain is important in the kinetics of the phase transition. This cooperative freezing idea has been applied to structural glasses including window glasses and supercooled liquids, and may be applicable across many systems to any first-order phase transition occurring on a complex free-energy landscape.

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Figure 1: Zero-field images of the same area of the sample (8×8 μm2) taken at 6 K.
Figure 2: Isothermal magnetic field dependence of MFM images and SQUID magnetization.
Figure 3: MFM images and magnetization.
Figure 4: HT phase diagrams and M(H) curves after FC.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Markert for the use of his SQUID and commercial SPM. We benefited from discussions with Q. Niu, P. Chaikin, A. MacDonald, P. Chandra and P. Chaddah. This work is supported by NSF DMR-0308575 (A.dL.) and NSF DMR-0405682 (S.W.C.).

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Crystal synthesis and characterization: N.H., S.P. and S.-W.C. VT MFM design and construction: A.dL. and C.I. Experiment design and planning: W.W., S.-W.C, C.I. and A.dL. Data acquisition and analysis: C.I. and W.W. 

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Correspondence to Alex de Lozanne.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Movie S1

Supplementary movie S1 (MOV 759 kb)

Supplementary Movie S2

Supplementary movie S2 (MOV 672 kb)

Supplementary Movie S3

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary figures S1-S3 and movie legends (PDF 187 kb)

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Wu, W., Israel, C., Hur, N. et al. Magnetic imaging of a supercooling glass transition in a weakly disordered ferromagnet. Nature Mater 5, 881–886 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1743

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