English

Brillouin scattering studies in Fe$_3$O$_4$ across the Verwey transition

Materials Science 2013-05-29 v2

Abstract

Brillouin scattering studies have been carried out on high quality single crystals of Fe3_3O4_4 with [100] and [110] faces in the temperature range of 300 to 30 K. The room temperature spectrum shows a surface Rayleigh wave (SRW) mode at 8 GHz and a longitudinal acoustic (LA) mode at 60 GHz. The SRW mode frequency shows a minimum at the Verwey transition temperature TVT_V of 123 K. The softening of the SRW mode frequency from about 250 K to TVT_V can be quantitatively understood as a result of a decrease in the shear elastic constant C44_{44}, arising from the coupling of shear strain to charge fluctuations. On the other hand, the LA mode frequency does not show any significant change around TVT_V, but shows a large change in its intensity. The latter shows a maximum at around 120 K in the cooling run and at 165 K in the heating run, exhibiting a large hysteresis of 45 K. This significant change in intensity may be related to the presence of stress-induced ordering of Fe3+^{3+} and Fe2+^{2+} at the octahedral sites, as well as to stress-induced domain wall motion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0312337,
  title  = {Brillouin scattering studies in Fe$_3$O$_4$ across the Verwey transition},
  author = {Md. Motin Seikh and Chandrabhas Narayana and P. A. Metcalf and J. M. Honig and A. K. Sood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0312337},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures, accepted in Physical Review B 2005