Manipulating TbMn₆Sn₆ via Cr doping

Materials containing kagome lattices have gained significant attention in part due to the coexistence of flat bands and Dirac points in their band structures which may become topologically non-trivial with the addition of spin-orbit coupling. The RT₆X₆ (R = rare earth, T = transition metal, X = Si, Ge, Sn) family is of particular interest due to the kagome layers being comprised solely of T. The ferrimagnet TbMn₆Sn₆ was recently claimed to be a quantum-limit Chern topological magnet [1], but the physics of this system is still being debated [2]. We present data on single crystals of Tb(Cr_xMn_1-x)₆Sn₆ showing that doping with largely non-magnetic Cr effectively tunes this system. The ferrimagnetic transition temperature and subsequent spin-reorientation temperature seen in TbMn₆Sn₆ both decrease with doping, the anomalous Hall effect is altered with doping, and a large coercivity is observed when the system is tuned to be nearly magnetically compensated. These responses provide evidence that doping can play a large role in engineering the magnetic and topological phases of the RT₆X₆ family.