Crystal and Electronic Study of Neodymium-Substituted CuFeO 2 Oxide
- PDF / 1,358,672 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 593.972 x 792 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 159 Views
ON oxides are a popular class of transition metal oxides (TMOs) studied with a broad range of research subjects such as batteries, magnetic materials, semiconductors, minerals, electronics, and optoelectronic devices.[1–5] The d shells of the TMs are also a playground for strong electronic correlations with the outer shell electrons of the neighboring atoms. Strongly correlated electron systems are a large class of compounds with elements that have unoccupied d- or f-electron shells with narrow energy bands. Due to the narrow energy bands (with high quantum symmetry), the d-f system interactions attract considerable attention in scientific studies because of the possibility of yielding fruitful results for technological applications. Additionally, a large amount of studies reported that several TMOs have dominant nonspatially homogeneous states occuring when several physical interactions such as charge, spin, lattice, or orbital are active simultaneously.[6] CuFeO2 is an important member of iron oxides as a low-dimensional TMOs with delafossite rhombohedral R-3m crystal geometry.[2–4] The popularity of the CuFeO2 oxides comes from their geometrically frustrated antiferromagnetic (AFM) [TN = 11 K (262 C)] character. Delafossite CuFeO2 oxide crystal OSMAN MURAT OZKENDIR, Associate Professor, is with the Energy Systems Engineering, Tarsus Faculty of Technology, Mersin University, Tarsus, Turkey. Contact email: [email protected] Manuscript submitted December 11, 2015. Article published online March 31, 2016 2906—VOLUME 47A, JUNE 2016
structure forms in slightly distorted triangular geometry with hexagonal layers. However, the crystal structure is highly affected by oxygen nonstoichiometry related with the change in cation valence bands.[2] Mainly, the bonding mechanism in the CuFeO2 oxide is governed by its 3d row elements Fe and Cu. When the 3d levels are presented in an environment where atoms get close to each other, they are the main role players during interatomic interactions with fivefold degeneracy. Partly occupied d shells of the TMs are the source of rich quantum symmetry in electronic interactions and reveal interesting physical phenomena exhibiting desired crystallographic, magnetic, electronic, or chemical properties.[4–9] In this study, the influence of the heavy fermion ‘‘Nd’’ substitution into the delafossite CuFeO2 structures was investigated in the crystal and electronic properties of the samples via the general formula NdxCu1xFeO2. The study was inspired by the interesting properties of the CuFeO2 that were reported in several previous studies, such as its possesing rich various magnetic phases at low temperature and paramagnetic behaviors at room temperature due to frusturated crystal structures, ferroelectricity, and vibratrional anisotropy.[10] Here, the author’s main goal is to investigate the electronic and crystal structure background of the delafossite CuFeO2 material and its amazing properties by substituting a rare earth element where highly active f-electrons are the main players in the mole
Data Loading...
