Single crystal growth and magnetic properties of antiferromagnet CePdSi

Nguyen, D.; Haga, Yoshinori   ; Matsuda, Tatsuma; Yamada, Tsutomu*; Thamizhavel, A.*; Okuda, Yusuke*; Takeuchi, Tetsuya*; Sugiyama, Kiyohiro*; Hagiwara, Masayuki*; Kindo, Koichi*; Settai, Rikio*; Onuki, Yoshichika*

We succeeded in growing a single crystal of CePdSi with the orthorhombic crystal structure by the Sn-flux method and measured the electrical resistivity, specific heat, magnetic susceptibility and magnetization. The antiferromagnetic ordering was confirmed to be = 7.2 K. The electronic specific heat coefficient was determined as 77 mJ/KmolCe. The antiferromagnetic easy-axis was found to be the [001] direction, with an ordered moment of = 1.3 /Ce, while [100] and [010] directions are hard-axes in magnetization. We observed a metamagnetic transition at 5.7 T for [001] and a saturation of magnetization above 12.1 T. The characteristic magnetic phase diagram was constructed. The crystalline electric field (CEF) scheme was proposed for CePdSi, where the splitting energies between the ground state and two excited doublets in the CEF scheme are estimated to be 87 K and 504 K, respectively.