Abstract
We have studied the low-temperature ac magnetic susceptibility of the diluted spin ice compound , where the magnetic Dy ions on the frustrated pyrochlore lattice have been replaced with nonmagnetic ions, or Lu. We examine a broad range of dilutions, , and we find that the freezing is suppressed for low levels of dilution but re-emerges for and persists to . This behavior can be understood as a nonmonotonic dependence of the quantum spin relaxation time with dilution. The results suggest that the observed spin freezing is fundamentally a single spin process that is affected by the local environment, rather than the development of spin-spin correlations as earlier data suggested.
2 More- Received 11 May 2004
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.70.184431
©2004 American Physical Society