Heat capacity study of the magnetic phases in a Nd5Ge3 single crystal

The different magnetic phases of the intermetallic compound Nd5Ge3 are studied in terms of the specific heat, in a broad range of temperatures (350 mK-140 K) and magnetic fields (up to 40 kOe). The expected T3 and T3/2 terms are not found in the antiferromagnetic (AFM) and ferromagnetic (FM) phases respectively, but a gapped T2 contribution that originates from a mixture of AFM and FM interactions in different dimensionalities under a large magnetocrystalline anisotropy, is present in both. An almost identical Schottky anomaly, that arises from the hyperfine splitting of the nuclear levels of the Nd3+ ions, is observed in both phases, which leads us to state that the magnetic-field induced transition AFM→FM that the system experiments below 26 K consists in the flip of the magnetic moments of the Nd ions, conserving the average local moment.