Discovery of the large magnetocaloric effect in HoB₂ has highlighted the practical advantage of heavy rare-earth ions. Other holmium compounds are of interest, and we here report the synthesis and the magnetic properties of HoSi1.67 and HoGe1.67 which form the same AlB₂-type structure but with vacancies. They are found to show the antiferromagnetic order with the Neel temperature 17.6(2)K for HoSi1.67 and 9.9(2)K for HoGe1.67, and the magnetic entropy changes at the temperature are 0.05(1)J/cm³K for HoSi1.67 and 0.08(1)J/cm³K for HoGe1.67. Magnetic orders were suppressed by replacing vacancies with nickel, resulting in an increase of magnetic entropy changes. Distance between the in-plane Ho³⁺ ions appears to be an important parameter leading to the transition between the antiferromagnetic (HoSi1.67) and the ferromagnetic (HoB₂) order. The finding may aid the exploration of other heavy rare-earth compounds for similar applications.
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Eguchi et al. (2024) studied this question.
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