Investigation of magnetism in layered two-dimensional triangular lattice oxide LixCoO2

The compound LiCoO2 has attracted lots of attention in the recent years because of its application in Li-ion batteries. Investigation of the magnetism in LixCoO2, using the single crystals have not been reported thus far. The crystal structure contains CoO2 layers arranged on a 2D triangular lattice. The presence of antiferromagentic interaction between the magnetic Co ions is expected to give rise to a geometrical frustration (due to the triangular geometry) and novel magnetic states are expected. For both samples, an anomaly in the dc susceptibility measurements is observed around 50 K indicating the onset of a long-range magnetic order. We propose to carry out neutron diffraction experiments on single crystal of LixCoO2 (x = 0.7 and 0.9) to investigate the nature of spin correlations and measure diffuse magnetic scattering to get the information about short-range magnetic order.