The influence of the grain size in the magnetic properties of phase separated manganites is an important issue evidenced more than a decade ago. The formation of long range ordered phases is suppressed as the grain size decreases giving place to a me
tastable state instead of the ground state. In this work we present a study of the magnetocaloric effect in the prototypical manganite La0.5Ca0.5MnO3 as function of the grain size. The differences obtained using direct and indirect methods are discussed in the framework of domain walls in the ferromagnetic phase of the system.
The possible application of the barocaloric effect to produce solid state refrigerators is a topic of interest in the field of applied physics. In this work, we present experimental data about the influence of external pressure on the magnetic proper
ties of a manganite with phase separation. Using the Jahn Teller effect associated with the presence of the charge ordering we were able to follow the transition to the ferromagnetic state induced by pressure. We also demonstrated that external pressure can assist the ferromagnetic state, decreasing the magnetic field necessary to generate the magnetic transition.
We report a heat dynamics analysis of the electrocaloric effect (ECE) in commercial multilayer capacitors based on BaTiO3 dielectric, a promising candidate for applications as a solid state cooling device. Direct measurements of the time evolution of
the samples temperature changes under different applied voltages allow us to decouple the contributions from Joule heating and from the ECE. Heat balance equations were used to model the thermal coupling between different parts of the system. Fingerprints of Joule heating and the ECE could be resolved at different time scales. We argue that Joule heating and the thermal coupling of the device to the environment must be carefully taken in to account in future developments of refrigeration technologies employing the ECE.
The magnetocaloric effect is the isothermal change of magnetic entropy and the adiabatic temperature change induced in a magnetic material when an external magnetic field is applied. In this work, we present an experimental setup to study this effect
in metamagnetic transitions, using the differential thermal analysis technique, which consists in measuring simultaneously the temperatures of the sample of interest and a reference one while an external magnetic field ramp is applied. We have tested our system to measure the magnetocaloric effect in La0.305Pr0.32Ca0.375MnO3, which presents phase separation effects at low temperatures (T < 200 K). We obtain DeltaT vs H curves, and analyze how the effect varies by changing the rate of the magnetic field ramp. Our results show that the intensity of the effect increases with the magnetic field change rate. We also have obtained the effective heat capacity of the system without the sample by performing calorimetric measurements using a pulse heat method, fitting the temperature change with a two tau description. With this analysis, we are able to describe the influence of the environment and subtract it to calculate the adiabatic temperature change of the sample.
