No Arabic abstract
We present reflectance measurements in the infrared region on a single crystal the rare earth scandate DyScO3. Measurements performed between room temperature and 10 K allow to determine the frequency of the infrared-active phonons, never investigated experimentally, and to get information on their temperature dependence. A comparison with the phonon peak frequency resulting from ab-initio computations is also provided. We finally report detailed data on the frequency dependence of the complex refractive index of DyScO3 in the terahertz region, which is important in the analysis of terahertz measurements on thin films deposited on DyScO3.
We have performed magnetic susceptibility and neutron scattering measurements on polycrystalline Ag-In-RE (RE: rare-earth) 1/1 approximants. In the magnetic susceptibility measurements, for most of the RE elements, inverse susceptibility shows linear behaviour in a wide temperature range, confirming well localized isotropic moments for the RE$^{3+}$ ions. Exceptionally for the light RE elements, such as Ce and Pr, non-linear behaviour was observed, possibly due to significant crystalline field splitting or valence fluctuation. For RE = Tb, the susceptibility measurement clearly shows a bifurcation of the field-cooled and zero-field-cooled susceptibility at $T_{rm f} = 3.7$~K, suggesting a spin-glass-like freezing. On the other hand, neutron scattering measurements detect significant development of short-range antiferromagnetic spin correlations in elastic channel, which accompanied by a broad peak at $hbaromega = 4$~meV in inelastic scattering spectrum. These features have striking similarity to those in the Zn-Mg-Tb quasicrystals, suggesting that the short-range spin freezing behaviour is due to local high symmetry clusters commonly seen in both the systems.
Near normal incident far-infrared reflectivity spectra of [111] dysprosium titanate (Dy2Ti2O4) single crystal have been measured at different temperatures. Seven phonon modes (eight at low temperature) are identified at frequency below 1000 cm-1. Optical conductivity spectra are obtained by fitting all the reflectivity spectra with the factorized form of the dielectric function. Both the Born effective charges and the static optical primitivity are found to increase with decreasing temperature. Moreover, phonon linewidth narrowering and phonon modes shift with decreasing temperature are also observed, which may result from enhanced charge localization. The redshift of several low frequency modes is attributed to the spin-phonon coupling. All observed optical properties can be explained within the framework of nearest neighbor ferromagnetic(FM) spin ice model.
We report a high-pressure study of orthorhombic rare-earth manganites AMnO3 using Raman scattering (for A = Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Tb and Dy) and synchrotron X-ray diffraction (for A = Pr, Sm, Eu, and Dy). In all cases, a structural and insulator-to-metal transition was evidenced, with a critical pressure that depends on the A-cation size. We analyze the compression mechanisms at work in the different manganites via the pressure dependence of the lattice parameters, the shear strain in the a-c plane, and the Raman bands associated with out-of-phase MnO6 rotations and in-plane O2 symmetric stretching modes. Our data show a crossover across the rare-earth series between two different kinds of behavior. For the smallest A-cations, the compression is nearly isotropic in the ac plane, with presumably only very slight changes of tilt angles and Jahn-Teller distortion. As the radius of the A-cation increases, the pressure-induced reduction of Jahn-Teller distortion becomes more pronounced and increasingly significant as a compression mechanism, while the pressure-induced bending of octahedra chains becomes conversely less pronounced. We finally discuss our results in the light of the notion of chemical pressure, and show that the analogy with hydrostatic pressure works quite well for manganites with small A-cations but can be misleading with large A-cations.
The electronic structure of the rare earth nitrides is studied systematically using the {it ab-initio} self-interaction corrected local-spin-density approximation (SIC-LSD). This approach allows both a localised description of the rare earth $f-$electrons and an itinerant description of the valence electrons. Localising different numbers of $f$-electrons on the rare earth atom corresponds to different valencies, and the total energies can be compared, providing a first-principles description of valence. CeN is found to be tetravalent while the remaining rare earth nitrides are found to be trivalent. We show that these materials have a broad range of electronic properties including forming a new class of half-metallic magnets with high magnetic moments and are strong candidates for applications in spintronic and spin-filtering devices.
Based on the electronic band structure obtained from first principles DFT calculations, the opticalspectra of yttrium and neodymium nickelates are computed. We show that the results are in fairagreement with available experimental data. We clarify the electronic transitions at the origin of thefirst two peaks, highlighting the important role of transitions from t2g states neglected in previousmodels. We discuss the evolution of the optical spectra from small to large rare-earth cations andrelate the changes to the electronic band structure.