No Arabic abstract
We report on the lattice evolution of BiFeO3 as function of temperature using far infrared emissivity, reflectivity, and X-ray absorption local structure. A power law fit to the lowest frequency soft phonon in the magnetic ordered phase yields an exponent {beta}=0.25 as for a tricritical point. At about 200 K below TN~640 K it ceases softening as consequence of BiFeO3 metastability. We identified this temperature as corresponding to a crossover transition to an order-disorder regime. Above ~700 K strong band overlapping, merging, and smearing of modes are consequence of thermal fluctuations and chemical disorder. Vibrational modes show band splits in the ferroelectric phase as emerging from triple degenerated species as from a paraelectric cubic phase above TC~1090 K. Temperature dependent X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) at the Fe K-edge shows that lower temperature Fe3+ turns into Fe2+. While this matches the FeO wustite XANES profile, the Bi LIII-edge downshift suggests a high temperature very complex bond configuration at the distorted A perovskite site. Overall, our local structural measurements reveal high temperature defect-induced irreversible lattice changes, below, and above the ferroelectric transition, in an environment lacking of long-range coherence. We did not find an insulator to metal transition prior to melting.
We report on near normal far- and mid-infrared emission and reflectivity of NdMnO3 perovskite from room temperature to sample decomposition above 1800 K. At 300 K the number infrared active phonons is in close agreement with the 25 calculated for the orthorhombic D2h16-Pbnm (Z=4) space group. Their number gradually decreases as we approach the temperature of orbital disorder at ~1023 K where the orthorhombic O lower temperature cooperative phase coexists with the cubic orthorhombic O. At above ~1200 K, the three infrared active phonons coincide with the expected for cubic Pm-3m (Z=1) in the high temperature insulating regime. Heating samples in dry air triggers double exchange conductivity by Mn3+ and Mn4+ ions and a small polaron mid-infrared band. Fits to the optical conductivity single out the octahedral antisymmetric and symmetric vibrational modes as main phonons in the electron-phonon interactions at 875 K. For 1745 K, it is enough to consider the symmetric stretching internal mode. An overdamped defect induced Drude component is clearly outlined at the highest temperatures. We conclude that Rare Earth manganites eg electrons are prone to spin, charge, orbital, and lattice couplings in an intrinsic orbital distorted perovskite lattice favoring embryonic low energy collective excitations.
We have developed an improved method of time-resolved x-ray reflectivity (XRR) using monochromatic synchrotron radiation. Our method utilizes a polycapillary x-ray optic to create a range of incident angles and an area detector to collect the specular reflections. By rotating the sample normal out of the plane of the incident fan, we can separate the surface diffuse scatter from the reflectivity signal, greatly improving the quality of the XRR spectra compared to previous implementations. We demonstrate the time-resolved capabilities of this system, with temporal resolution as low as 10 ms, by measuring XRR during the annealing of Al/Ni nano-scale multilayers and use this information to extract the activation energy for interdiffusion in this system.
Iron-oxide nanoparticles have been synthesized by high temperature arc plasma route with different plasma currents and characterized for their structure, morphology and local atomic order. Fe K-edge x-ray absorption spectra reveal distinct local structure of the samples grown with different plasma currents. We have shown that the local disorder is higher for the higher plasma current grown samples that also have a larger average particle-size. The results provide useful information to control structural and morphological properties of nanoparticles grown by high temperature plasma synthesis process.
We report inelastic neutron scattering measurements of the phonon spectra in a pure powder sample of the multiferroic material BiFeO3. A high-temperature range was covered to unravel the changes in the phonon dynamics across the Neel (T_N ~ 650 K) and Curie (T_C ~ 1100 K) temperatures. Experimental results are accompanied by ab-initio lattice dynamical simulations of phonon density of states to enable microscopic interpretations of the observed data. The calculations reproduce well the observed vibrational features and provide the partial atomic vibrational components. Our results reveal clearly the signature of three different phase transitions both in the diffraction patterns and phonon spectra. The phonon modes are found to be most affected by the transition at the T_C. The spectroscopic evidence for the existence of a different structural modification just below the decomposition limit (T_D ~ 1240 K) is unambiguous indicating strong structural changes that may be related to oxygen vacancies and concomitant Fe3+ to Fe2+ reduction and spin transition.
We report the development of a laboratory-based Rowland-circle monochromator that incorporates a low poer x-ray (bremsstrahlung) tube source, a spherically-bent crystal analyzer (SBCA), and an energy-resolving solid-state detector. This relatively inexpensive, introductory level instrument achieves 1-eV energy resolution for photon energies of 5 keV to 10 keV while also dmeonstrating a net efficiency previously seen only in laboratory monochromators having much coarser energy resolution. Despite the use of only a compact, air-cooled 10 W x-ray tube, we find count rates for nonresonant x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) comparable to those achived at monochromatized spectroscopy beamlines at synchrotron light sources. For x-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES), the monochromatized flux is small (due to the use of a low-powered x-ray generator) but still useful for routine transmission-mode studies of concentrated samples. These results indicate that upgrading to a standard commercial high-powered line-focused x-ray tube or rotating anode x-ray generator would result in monochromatized fluxes of order 10^6 to 10^7 photons/s with no loss in energy resolution. This work establishes core technical capabilities for a rejuvenation of laboratory-based x-ray spectroscopies that could have special relevance for contemporary research on catalytic or electrical energy storage systems using transition-metal, lanthanide, or noble-metal active species.