No Arabic abstract
Materials that exhibit colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) are currently the focus of an intense research effort, driven by the technological applications that their sensitivity lends them to. Using the angular correlation of photons from electron-positron annihilation, we present a first glimpse of the Fermi surface of a material that exhibits CMR, supported by ``virtual crystal electronic structure calculations. The Fermi surface is shown to be sufficiently cubic in nature that it is likely to support nesting.
A field-induced crossover is observed in the resistivity and magnetization (M) of a La(0.7)Pb(0.3)MnO(3) single crystal. The field-dependence of the resistivity and M suggests that a small spin-canted species with mean-field-like interactions dominates at low fields (H), whereas, individual spins and 3D Ising/Heisenberg models describe the high-H behavior rather well. Around the ferromagnetic transition, an H-induced destruction of the small spin-canted magnetic polarons is accompanied by large magnetoresistance.
By using laboratory x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) and hard x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (HX-PES) at a synchrotron facility, we report an empirical semi-quantitative relationship between the valence/core-level x-ray photoemission spectral weight and electrical conductivity in La_{1-x}Sr_{x}MnO_{3} as a function of x. In the Mn 2p_{3/2} HX-PES spectra, we observed the shoulder structure due to the Mn^{3+} well-screened state. However, the intensity at x=0.8 was too small to explain its higher electrical conductivity than x=0.0, which confirms our recent analysis on the Mn 2p_{3/2} XPS spectra. The near-Fermi level XPS spectral weight was found to be a measure of the variation of electrical conductivity with x in spite of a far lower energy resolution compared with the energy scale of the quasiparticle (coherent) peak because of the concurrent change of the coherent and incoherent spectral weight.
^139La nuclear magnetic resonance studies reveal markedly different magnetic properties of the two sites created by the charged domain wall formation in La_(5/3)Sr_(1/3)NiO_4. NMR is slow compared to neutron scattering; we observe a 30 K suppression in magnetic ordering temperature indicating glassy behavior. Applied magnetic field reorients the in-plane ordered moments with respect to the lattice, but the relative orientation of the spins amongst themselves is stiff and broadly distributed.
We have studied acoustoelectric (AE) effect produced by surface acoustic waves (SAW) in a monolithic layered structure, composed of piezodielectric LiNbO_{3} substrate and La_{0.67}Ca_{0.33}MnO_{3} film. The experiments unexpectedly revealed in the longitudinal AE effect an anomalous contribution, invariant upon reversal of SAW propagation, which coexists with the ordinary (odd in wave vector) effect. The anomalous effect dominates near the metal-insulator transition, while the ordinary effect prevails at high and low temperatures. We show that the anomalous effect is caused by strong modulation of the film conductivity produced by the SAW elastic deformations.
We have resolved a controversial issue concerning the oxygen-isotope shift of the ferromagnetic transition temperature T_{C} in the manganite La_{0.8}Ca_{0.2}MnO_{3+y}. We show that the giant oxygen-isotope shift of T_C observed in the normal oxygen-isotope exchanged samples is indeed intrinsic, while a much smaller shift observed in the argon annealed samples is an artifact. The argon annealing causes the 18O sample to partially exchange back to the 16O isotope due to a small 16O contamination in the Ar gas. Such a contamination is commonly caused by the oxygen outgas that is trapped in the tubes, connectors and valves. The present results thus umambiguously demonstrate that the observed large oxygen isotope effect is an intrinsic property of manganites, and places an important constraint on the basic physics of these materials.