Crystal growth, structure, and incoherent metallic behaviour of FeCrAs

There is growing interest in a possible connection between incoherent metallic conduction and high temperature superconductivity, that is exemplified by the behaviour of the parent compounds of the new iron-pnictide high-temperature superconductors. We have recently discovered very incoherent behaviour in the non-superconducting arsenide, FeCrAs. This material shows a non-metallic resistivity that rises with decreasing temperature without saturation or a gap, over three decades of temperature, from 80 mK to 800 K. We briefly review this behaviour, and address the question of disorder: how to test for the presence of disorder in a system where the scattering rate inferred from the resistivity is highly abnormal, and how to produce single crystals with low levels of disorder. Our discussion will focus on magnetic properties. FeCrAs is a partly frustrated magnetic system with a Nèel temperature T_N that depends on sample quality, a sample-dependent spin freezing temperature T_F < T_N, and magnetic hysteresis that depends strongly on preparation conditions due to ferromagnetic minority phases in disordered samples.