No Arabic abstract
Crystal-field excitations in transition-metal oxides where -rare-earth elements locate in the space between the transition-metal-oxide tetrahedra and octahedra, are assumed to be robust with respect to external perturbations such as temperature. Using inelastic neutron-scattering experiments, a giant shift of the energy of the lowest crystal-field excitation of Er$^{3+}$ ($^{4}$I$_{15/2}$) in ErFeO$_3$ from 0.35 meV to 0.75 meV was observed on cooling from 10K to 1.5K through the magnetic ordering temperature of Er$^{3+}$ at 4.1 K. A crystal-field model was proposed to explain the observed crystal field excitations in this work. The model indicates the lowest-energy crystal-field excitation in ErFeO$_3$ is the first Kramers doublet above the ground state. Its energy substantially shifts by the internal field induced by the ordered Er$^{3+}$ magnetic moments. Further magnetic-field-dependent measurements provide strong supportive evidence for this scenario. By fitting the external magnetic-field dependency of the crystal-field excitation energy, the internal field generated by Er$^{3+}$ magnetic moments was derived to be ~0.33meV. The result indicates that the internal field of Er$^{3+}$ magnetic moments contribute to the energy shift of the crystal-field excitations. The giant energy shift under fields could be attributed to the anisotropy of the large effective g-factor.
Crystal-field excitations, for example in transition-metal oxides where a rare-earth element is used as a spacer between the transition-metal-oxide tetrahedra and octahedra, are assumed to be extremely robust with respect to external perturbations such as temperature. Using inelastic neutron scattering experiments, a giant shift of the energy of the lowest crystal-field excitation of Er3+ (4I15/2) in ErFeO3 from 0.30(2) meV to 0.75(2) meV was measured below the magnetic-ordering temperature of erbium at 4.1 K. Quantum-mechanical point-charge calculations of the crystal-field levels indicate that the shift is caused by the internal magnetic field created by the erbium spins themselves, which causes a Zeeman splitting of the erbium 4f electronic levels, and therefore a change in the energies of crystal-field transitions. To verify this explanation, the effect of an external magnetic field on the crystal-field excitations was measured by inelastic neutron scattering and compared to the field-dependent point-charge calculations. The existence of an internal magnetic exchange interaction will have implications for a deeper understanding of a broader group of phenomena such as multiferroic properties or spin frustration, which are a consequence of various competing electronic and magnetic exchange interactions.
We report a study on the temperature dependence of the charge-neutral crystal field (dd) excitations in cupric oxide, using nonresonant inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) spectroscopy. Thanks to a very high energy resolution (60 meV), we observe thermal effects on the dd excitation spectrum fine structure between temperatures of 10-320 K. With an increasing temperature, the spectra broaden considerably. We assign the temperature dependence of the dd excitations to the relatively large electron-phonon coupling.
The quantum critical behavior of the Ising glass in a magnetic field is investigated. We focus on the spin glass to paramagnet transition of the transverse degrees of freedom in the presence of finite longitudinal field. We use two complementary techniques, the Landau theory close to the T=0 transition and the exact diagonalization method for finite systems. This allows us to estimate the size of the critical region and characterize various crossover regimes. An unexpectedly small energy scale on the disordered side of the critical line is found, and its possible relevance to experiments on metallic glasses is briefly discussed.
We report comprehensive Raman-scattering measurements on a single crystal of double-perovskite Nd2ZnIrO6 in temperature range of 4-330 K, and spanning a broad spectral range from 20 cm-1 to 5500 cm-1. The paper focuses on lattice vibrations and electronic transitions involving Kramers doublets of the rare-earth Nd3+ ion with local C1 site symmetry. Temperature evolution of these quasi-particle excitations have allowed us to ascertain the intricate coupling between lattice and electronic degrees of freedom in Nd2ZnIrO6. Strong coupling between phonons and crystal-field excitation is observed via renormalization of the self-energy parameter of the phonons i.e. peak frequency and line-width. The phonon frequency shows abrupt hardening and line-width narrowing below ~ 100 K for the majority of the observed first-order phonons. We observed splitting of the lowest Kramers doublets of ground state (4I9/2) multiplets i.e. lifting of the Kramers degeneracy, prominently at low-temperature (below ~ 100 K), attributed to the Nd-Nd/Ir exchange interactions and the intricate coupling with the lattice degrees of freedom. The observed splitting is of the order of ~ 2-3 meV and is consistent with the estimated value. We also observed a large number of high-energy modes, 46 in total, attributed to the intra-configurational transitions between 4f3 levels of Nd3+ coupled to the phonons reflected in their anomalous temperature evolution.
We study the magneto-optical (MO) response of polar semiconductor BiTeI with giant bulk Rashba spin splitting at various carrier densities. Despite being non-magnetic, the material is found to yield a huge MO activity in the infrared region under moderate magnetic fields (<3 T). By comparison with first-principles calculations, we show that such an enhanced MO response is mainly due to the intraband transitions between the Rashba-split bulk conduction bands in BiTeI, which give rise to distinct novel features and systematic doping dependence of the MO spectra. We further predict an even more pronounced enhancement in the low-energy MO response and dc Hall effect near the crossing (Dirac) point of the conduction bands.