Field-driven successive phase transitions in quasi-two-dimensional frustrated antiferromagnet Ba$_2$CoTeO$_6$ and highly degenerate classical ground states

We report the results of magnetization and specific heat measurements of Ba$_2$CoTeO$_6$ composed of two subsystems A and B, which are magnetically described as an $S\,{=}\,1/2$ triangular-lattice Heisenberg-like antiferromagnet and a $J_1-J_2$ honeycomb-lattice Ising-like antiferromagnet, respectively. These two subsystems were found to be approximately decoupled. Ba$_2$CoTeO$_6$ undergoes magnetic phase transitions at $T_{\rm N1}\,{=}\,12.0$ K and $T_{\rm N2}\,{=}\,3.0$ K, which can be interpreted as the orderings of subsystems B and A, respectively. Subsystem A exhibits a magnetization plateau at one-third of the saturation magnetization for the magnetic field $H$ perpendicular to the $c$ axis owing to the quantum order-by-disorder, whereas for $H\,{\parallel}\,c$, subsystem B shows three-step metamagnetic transitions with magnetization plateaus at zero, one-third and one-half of the saturation magnetization. The analysis of the magnetization process for subsystem B shows that the classical ground states at these plateaus are infinitely degenerate within the Ising model.

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