Anomalous structural behavior in the metamagnetic transition of FeRh thin films from a local viewpoint

The metamagnetic transition in FeRh thin films has been investigated via temperature-dependent x-ray-absorption fine-structure spectroscopy in order to gain correlations between magnetization and local electronic and geometric structures. According to the Fe and Rh K-edge x-ray-absorption near-edge structure (XANES), strong hybridization between Fe and Rh was revealed to exist. This Fe-Rh hybridization was observed to decrease during the phase transition from the antiferromagnetic (AFM) to ferromagnetic (FM) phases from the systematic change in the Fe K-edge XANES. In addition, only the Debye-Waller factor of the Fe-Fe pair in the AFM phase was observed to be considerably enhanced when compared with that in the FM phase, which was ascribed to local structural fluctuation inherent in the AFM phase. By considering the different features of the exchange interactions in Fe-Rh and Fe-Fe, this anomalous behavior is interpreted as being consistent with the recent theoretical study proposing the local fluctuations of spin and structure. Therefore, we consider that the local spin and Fe-Fe distance fluctuations play an important role in driving the metamagnetic transition, whereas the Fe-Rh hybridization correlates with the static stability of each magnetic phase.