Antiferromagnetic order of effective Zn moments in La2-xSrxCuO4 (x≤0.03) -: art. no. 214408

We have measured the static magnetic susceptibility of La2-xSrxCu1-zZnzO4 in order to study the magnetic contribution of Zn doping induced spin vacancies in the CuO2 planes. Our data clearly show that these effective Zn moments (EZM) are antiferromagnetically ordered below the Neel temperature T-N of the Cu spin lattice. Above T-N the EZM behave like a Curie-Weiss paramagnet with a small effective moment of mu(eff)similar to0.65mu(B)/Zn atom, which indicates that strong antiferromagnetic correlations between the EZM persist for T>T-N. Furthermore, we have analyzed the height of the Neel peaks, to determine the susceptibility chi(EZM) of the EZM for T>T-N directly from the experimental data. We find that in the paramagnetic phase the temperature dependence of chi(EZM) is different from that in the antiferromagnetic phase. To describe chi(EZM) for T