Phase transition in nonmagnetic Al-doped delafossite oxide CuCrO2: Monte Carlo simulation

In this work, the effects of the lattice defects and random exchange interaction on the phase transition in the classical frustrated spin model (Lin et al., 2014) [14] are investigated by Monte Carlo simulation in order to study the nonmagnetic Al doping effect in CuCrO2. It is observed that the long range magnetic order can be significantly suppressed by the lattice defects and random exchange induced by the Al substitution, qualitatively consistent with experimental observation. Thus, both the lattice defects and random exchange are confirmed to be responsible for the variation of the transition temperature of CuCr1 − xAlxO2 with x.