Muon spin rotation to determine internal fields in HfNiSn

DOI

HfNiSn is a semiconducting material with cubic crystal symmetry, and as such it should not show any anisotropy in electronic transport.However, at low temperatures we observe deviations from this normal semiconducting behavior: the longitudinal resistance (where a voltage drop is measured along the path of an applied current) is clearly different from the transverse resistance (where the voltage is measured perpendicular to the current path). Such a behavior is normally observed in an applied magnetic field, but in HfNiSn we see this anisotropy already at zero magnetic field. This result is surprising, as both theoretical calculations and measurements the magnetic properties of HfNiSn indicate it is a nonmagnetic material. It is in fact strongly diamagnetic. We suspect that HfNiSn may possess an internal magnetic field, which we want to verify using the spins of muons as a probe.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.86388806
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/86388806
Provenance
Creator Dr Aidy Hillier; Dr Lucia Steinke
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2020
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Natural Sciences; Physics
Temporal Coverage Begin 2017-05-31T08:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2017-06-08T10:21:09Z