Magnetite, Fe3O4, is the first magnetic material discovered and utilized by mankind in Ancient Greece, yet it still attracts attention due to its puzzling properties. This is largely due to the quest for a full and coherent understanding of the Verwey transition that occurs at TV=124 K and is associated with a drop of electric conductivity and a complex structural phase transition. A recent detailed analysis of the structure, based on single crystal diffraction, suggests that the electron localization pattern contains linear three-Fe-site units, the so-called trimerons. Here we show that whatever the electron localization pattern is, it partially survives up to room temperature as short-range correlations in the high-temperature cubic phase, easily discernible by diffuse scattering. Additionally, {\it ab initio} electronic structure calculations reveal that characteristic features in these diffuse scattering patterns can be correlated with the Fermi surface topology.
@article{arxiv.1401.4091,
title = {Short-Range Correlations in Magnetite above the Verwey Temperature},
author = {Alexey Bosak and Dmitry Chernyshov and Moritz Hoesch and Przemyslaw Piekarz and Mathieu Le Tacon and Michael Krisch and Andrzej Kozlowski and Andrzej M. Oleś and Krzysztof Parlinski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.4091},
year = {2014}
}