Monte Carlo study on critical exponents of the classical Heisenberg model in ferromagnetic icosahedral quasicrystal

Abstract

Quasicrystals (QCs) lack three-dimensional periodicity of atomic arrangement but possess long-range structural order, which are distinct from periodic crystals and random systems. Here, we show how the ferromagnetic (FM) order arises in the icosahedral QC (i-QC) on the basis of the Monte Carlo simulation of the Heisenberg model on the Yb lattice of Cd$_{5.7}$Yb composed of regular icosahedrons. By finite-size scaling of the Monte Carlo data, we identified the critical exponents of the magnetization, magnetic susceptibility, and spin correlation length, $\beta=0.508(30)$, $\gamma=1.361(59)$, and $\nu=0.792(17)$, respectively. We confirmed that our data satisfy the hyperscaling relation and estimated the other critical exponents $\alpha=-0.376(51)$, $\delta=3.68(23)$, and $\eta=0.282(65)$. These results show a new universality class inherent in the i-QC, which is different from those in periodic magnets and spin glasses. In the i-QC, each Yb site at vertices of the regular icosahedrons is classified into 8 classes with respect to the coordination numbers of the nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor bonds. We revealed the FM-transition mechanism by showing that the difference in the local environment of each site is governed by cooperative evolution of spin correlations upon cooling, giving rise to the critical phenomena.