Anomalous Itinerant-Electron Metamagnetic Transition in the Layered Sr1-xCaxCo2P2 System

We report magnetic properties of the layered itinerant system, Sr$_{1-x}$Ca$_x$Co$_2$P$_2$ in the magnetic field up to 70 T. As for the exchange-enhanced Pauli paramagnetic metal SrCo$_2$P$_2$, the magnetization curve shows two characteristic anomalies. The low-field anomaly is small without obvious hysteresis, and the high-field one is a typical behavior of the itinerant-electron metamagnetic transition (IEMT). Such a successive transition in the magnetization curve cannot be explained by the conventional phenomenological theory for IEMT due to the Landau expansion of the free energy, but by the extended Landau expansion theory with distinguishable two energy states. In the systematical study of Sr$_{1-x}$Ca$_x$Co$_2$P$_2$, furthermore, the metamagnetic transition field decreases and goes to zero as $x$ increases up to 0.5, indicating that the ferromagnetic quantum critical point (QCP) exists at $x \sim 0.5$.

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