No Arabic abstract
Studying the response of materials to strain can elucidate subtle properties of electronic structure in strongly correlated materials. So far, mostly the relation between strain and resistivity, the so called elastoresistivity, has been investigated. The elastocaloric effect is a second rank tensor quantity describing the relation between entropy and strain. In contrast to the elastoresistivity, the elastocaloric effect is a thermodynamic quantity. Experimentally, elastocaloric effect measurements are demanding since the thermodynamic conditions during the measurement have to be well controlled. Here we present a technique to measure the elastocaloric effect under quasi adiabatic conditions. The technique is based on oscillating strain, which allows for increasing the frequency of the elastocaloric effect above the thermal relaxation rate of the sample. We apply the technique to Co-doped iron pnictide superconductors and show that the thermodynamic signatures of second order phase transitions in the elastocaloric effect closely follow those observed in calorimetry experiments. In contrast to the heat capacity, the electronic signatures in the elastocaloric effect are measured against a small phononic background even at high temperatures, establishing this technique as a powerful complimentary tool for extracting the entropy landscape proximate to a continuous phase transition.
Deformations of amorphous polymer networks prepared with significant concentrations of liquid crystalline mesogens have been recently reported to undergo mechanotropic phase transitions. Here, we report that these mechanotropic phase transitions are accompanied by an elastocaloric response ($Delta T = 2.9 text{ K}$). Applied uniaxial strain to the elastomeric polymer network transitions the organization of the material from a disordered, amorphous state (order parameter $Q=0$) to the nematic phase ($Q=0.47$). Both the magnitude of the elastocaloric temperature change and mechanically induced order parameter are dependent on the concentration of liquid crystal mesogens in the material. While the observed temperature changes in these materials are smaller than those observed in shape memory alloys, the responsivity, defined as the temperature change divided by the input stress, is larger by an order of magnitude.
The dipolar interaction is known to substantially affect the properties of magnetic nanoparticles. This is particularly important when the particles are kept in a fluid suspension or packed inside nano-carriers. In addition to its usual long-range nature, in these cases the dipolar interaction may also induce the formation of clusters of particles, thereby strongly modifying their magnetic anisotropies. In this paper we show how AC susceptibility may be used to obtain important information regarding the influence of the dipolar interaction in a sample. We develop a model which includes both aspects of the dipolar interaction and may be fitted directly to the susceptibility data. The usual long-range nature of the interaction is implemented using a mean-field solution, whereas the particle-particle aggregation is modeled using a distribution of anisotropy constants. The model is then applied to two samples studied at different concentrations. One consists of spherical magnetite nanoparticles dispersed in oil and the other of cubic magnetite nanoparticles embedded on PLGA nanospheres. We also introduce a simple technique to access the importance of the dipolar interaction in a given sample, based on the height of the AC susceptibility peaks for different driving frequencies. Our results help illustrate the important effect that the dipolar interaction has in most nanoparticle samples.
We present a comprehensive study of the frequency-dependent sensitivity for measurements of the AC elastocaloric effect by applying both exactly soluble models and numerical methods to the oscillating heat flow problem. These models reproduce the finer details of the thermal transfer functions observed in experiments, considering here representative data for single-crystal Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Co$_x$)$_2$As$_2$. Based on our results, we propose a set of practical guidelines for experimentalists using this technique. This work establishes a baseline against which the frequency response of the AC elastocaloric technique can be compared and provides intuitive explanations of the detailed structure observed in experiments.
We review the behavior of the entropy per particle in various two-dimensional electronic systems. The entropy per particle is an important characteristic of any many body system that tells how the entropy of the ensemble of electrons changes if one adds one more electron. Recently, it has been demonstrated how the entropy per particle of a two-dimensional electron gas can be extracted from the recharging current dynamics in a planar capacitor geometry. These experiments pave the way to the systematic studies of entropy in various crystal systems including novel two-dimensional crystals such as gapped graphene, germanene and silicene. Theoretically, the entropy per particle is linked to the temperature derivative of the chemical potential of the electron gas by the Maxwell relation. Using this relation, we calculate the entropy per particle in the vicinity of topological transitions in various two-dimensional electronic systems. We show that the entropy experiences quantized steps at the points of Lifshitz transitions in a two-dimensional electronic gas with a parabolic energy spectrum. In contrast, in doubled-gapped Dirac materials, the entropy per particles demonstrates characteristic spikes once the chemical potential passes through the band edges. The transition from a topological to trivial insulator phase in germanene is manifested by the disappearance of a strong zero-energy resonance in the entropy per particle dependence on the chemical potential. We conclude that studies of the entropy per particle shed light on multiple otherwise hidden peculiarities of the electronic band structure of novel two-dimensional crystals.
The Extended Fermi-Hubbard model is a rather studied Hamiltonian due to both its many applications and a rich phase diagram. Here we prove that all the phase transitions encoded in its one dimensional version are detectable via non-local operators related to charge and spin fluctuations. The main advantage in using them is that, in contrast to usual local operators, their asymptotic average value is finite only in the appropriate gapped phases. This makes them powerful and accurate probes to detect quantum phase transitions. Our results indeed confirm that they are able to properly capture both the nature and the location of the transitions. Relevantly, this happens also for conducting phases with a spin gap, thus providing an order parameter for the identification of superconducting and paired superfluid phases