Magnetic and thermal properties of ternary Cu-X-Mn alloys

Abstract

Specific heat and magnetization measurements have been made in the temperature range 1.7–5.2 K on ternary spin-glass alloys based on Cu–0.25 at.% Mn and Cu-4 at.% Mn. Changes in both the thermal and the magnetic properties with the concentration of a third element (Pt or Al) provide evidence for the importance of the distribution of interaction strengths in determining the details of spin-glass phenomena. A simple scaling hypothesis applied to the thermal data suggests that, whereas the addition of Al to Cu-Mn preserves the binary alloy interaction distribution, the addition of Pt introduces new terms that may be attributable to the Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interaction.