Neutron powder diffraction study on the iron-based nitride superconductor ThFeAsN

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, China
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing 100049, China
³ Department of Physics, Shandong University of Technology - Zibo 255049, China
⁴ Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Lucas Heights NSW-2232, Australia
⁵ NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, MD 20899-6102, USA
⁶ Department of Physics and State Key Lab of Silicon Materials, Zhejiang University - Hangzhou 310027, China
⁷ Collaborative Innovation Centre of Advanced Microstructures - Nanjing 210093, China
⁸ Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter - Beijing 100190, China

^(a) hqluo@iphy.ac.cn

Received: 14 March 2017
Accepted: 7 April 2017

Abstract

We report neutron diffraction and transport results on the newly discovered superconducting nitride ThFeAsN with . No magnetic transition, but a weak structural distortion around 160 K, is observed by cooling from 300 K to 6 K. Analysis on the resistivity, Hall transport and crystal structure suggests that this material behaves as an electron optimally doped pnictide superconductor due to extra electrons from nitrogen deficiency or oxygen occupancy at the nitrogen site, which, together with the low arsenic height, may enhance the electron itinerancy and reduce the electron correlations, thus suppressing the static magnetic order.