Measurement of the magnetic octupole susceptibility of PrV<sub>2</sub>Al<sub>20</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39143053.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-51269-x and PMC identifier 11325040.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
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Abstract
Revealing the presence of magnetic octupole order and associated octupole fluctuations in solids is a highly challenging task due to the lack of simple external fields that can couple to magnetic octupoles. Here, we demonstrate a methodology for probing the magnetic octupole susceptibility of a candidate material, PrV<sub>2</sub>Al<sub>20</sub>, using a product of magnetic field H<sub>i</sub> and shear strain ϵ<sub>jk</sub> as a composite effective field, while employing an adiabatic elastocaloric effect to probe the response. We observe Curie-Weiss behavior in the obtained octupolar susceptibility down to approximately 3 K. Although octupole order does not appear to be the leading multipolar channel in PrV<sub>2</sub>Al<sub>20</sub>, our results nevertheless reveal the presence of strong magnetic octupole fluctuations and hence demonstrate that octupole order is at least a competing state. More broadly, our results highlight how anisotropic strain can be combined with magnetic fields to probe elusive 'hidden' electronic orders.