Anomalous Nernst effect in the noncollinear antiferromagnet Mn5Si3

Abstract

Abstract Investigating the off-diagonal components of the conductivity and thermoelectric tensor of materials hosting complex antiferromagnetic structures has become a viable method to reveal the effects of topology and chirality on the electronic transport in these systems. In this respect, Mn5Si3 is an interesting metallic compound that exhibits several antiferromagnetic phases below 100 K with different collinear and noncollinear arrangements of Mn magnetic moments determined from neutron scattering. Previous electronic transport measurements have shown that the transitions between the various phases give rise to large changes of the anomalous Hall effect. Here, we report measurements of the anomalous Nernst effect of Mn5Si3 single crystals that also show clear transitions between the different magnetic phases. In the noncollinear phase, we observe an unusual sign change of the zero-field Nernst signal with a concomitant decrease of the Hall signal and a gradual reduction of the remanent magnetization. Furthermore, a symmetry analysis of the proposed magnetic structures shows that both effects should actually vanish. These results indicate a symmetry-breaking modification of the magnetic state with a rearrangement of the magnetic moments at low temperatures, thus questioning the previously reported models for the noncollinear magnetic structure obtained from neutron scattering.