Unusual ferrimagnetism in CaFe2O4

Incomplete cancellation of collinear antiparallel spins gives rise to ferrimagnetism. Even if the oppositely polarized spins are owing to the equal number of a single magnetic element having the same valence state, in principle, a ferrimagnetic state can still arise from the crystallographic inequivalence of the host ions. However, experimental identification of such a state as "ferrimagnetic"is not straightforward because of the often tiny magnitude expected for M and the requirement for a sophisticated technique to differentiate similar magnetic sites. We report a synchrotron-based resonant x-ray investigation at the Fe L2,3 edges on an epitaxial film of CaFe2O4, which exhibits two magnetic phases with similar energies. We find that while one phase of CaFe2O4 is antiferromagnetic, the other one is ferrimagnetic with an antiparallel arrangement of an equal number of spins between two distinct crystallographic sites with very similar local coordination environments. Our results further indicate two distinct origins of an overall minute M; one is intrinsic, from distinct Fe3+ sites, and the other one is extrinsic, arising from defective Fe2+ likely forming weakly coupled ferrimagnetic clusters. These two origins are uncorrelated and have very different coercive fields. Hence, this work provides a direct experimental demonstration of ferrimagnetism solely due to crystallographic inequivalence of the Fe3+ as the origin of the weak M of CaFe2O4.
The resonant x-ray diffraction experiments were performed at the X11MA beamline in the Swiss Light Source under Proposal No. 20191307 and at the BL17SU in the SPring-8 under Proposal No. 20200012. The x-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements were performed at the XTreme beamline in the Swiss Light Source during in-house access. H.U. acknowledges the National Centers of Competence in Research in Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology (NCCR Grant MUST-No. 51NF40-183615) from the Swiss National Science Foundation and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 801459–FP-RESOMUS. E.S. is supported by the NCCR Materials’ Revolution: Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (NCCR MARVEL Grant No. 182892) from Swiss National Foundation and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 884104 (PSI-FELLOW-III-3i). N.O.H. acknowledges financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Grant No. 200021_169017. M.B. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through Projects No. 200021-196964 and 200021_169698, respectively. Financial support by the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron) and the Ubbo Emmius Funds of the University of Groningen is also gratefully acknowledged
With funding from the Spanish government through the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000917-S).