101 research outputs found
Structural phase transition in IrTe: A combined study of optical spectroscopy and band structure calculations
IrPtTe is an interesting system showing competing phenomenon
between structural instability and superconductivity. Due to the large atomic
numbers of Ir and Te, the spin-orbital coupling is expected to be strong in the
system which may lead to nonconventional superconductivity. We grew single
crystal samples of this system and investigated their electronic properties. In
particular, we performed optical spectroscopic measurements, in combination
with density function calculations, on the undoped compound IrTe in an
effort to elucidate the origin of the structural phase transition at 280 K. The
measurement revealed a dramatic reconstruction of band structure and a
significant reduction of conducting carriers below the phase transition. We
elaborate that the transition is not driven by the density wave type
instability but caused by the crystal field effect which further
splits/separates the energy levels of Te (p, p) and Te p bands.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure
Dilatometry study of the ferromagnetic order in single-crystalline URhGe
Thermal expansion measurements have been carried out on single-crystalline
URhGe in the temperature range from 2 to 200 K. At the ferromagnetic transition
(Curie temperature T_C = 9.7 K), the coefficients of linear thermal expansion
along the three principal orthorhombic axes all exhibit pronounced positive
peaks. This implies that the uniaxial pressure dependencies of the Curie
temperature, determined by the Ehrenfest relation, are all positive.
Consequently, the calculated hydrostatic pressure dependence dT_C/dp is
positive and amounts to 0.12 K/kbar. In addition, the effective Gruneisen
parameter was determined. The low-temperature electronic Gruneisen parameter
\Gamma_{sf} = 14 indicates an enhanced volume dependence of the ferromagnetic
spin fluctuations at low temperatures. Moreover, the volume dependencies of the
energy scales for ferromagnetic order and ferromagnetic spin fluctuations were
found to be identical.Comment: 5 page
Condensation of free volume in structures of nematic and hexatic liquid crystals
Eight novel liquid crystalline materials were prepared containing highly branched terminal chains, either 2,4,4-trimethylpentyl or 3,5,5-trimethylhexyl. All materials exhibit nematic mesophases, with additional smectic (Sm) C, hexatic B and SmI phases for certain homologues. Analysis by small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering reveals continual build-up of the correlation length within the nematic phases, where we also observe splitting of the small angle peak into four lobes, indicating pretransitional Sm fluctuations. Connoscopy confirms the nematic phase to be uniaxial and optically positive. We observe that in the solid state, the molecules exist as staggered antiparallel pairs as a consequence of the sterically demanding bulky terminal group, and this would also appear to manifest in the hexatic B phase, where the layer spacing was found to be greater than the molecular length. If true, this is an example of pair formation driven by sterics rather than dipole–dipole interactions and suggests that reentrant systems driven purely by steric frustration may be found
Ab initio evaluation of local effective interactions in
We will present the numerical evaluation of the hopping and magnetic exchange
integrals for a nearest-neighbor model of the quarter-filled
compound. The effective integrals are obtained from
valence-spectroscopy {\em ab initio} calculations of embedded crystal fragments
(two pyramids in the different geometries corresponding to the desired
parameters). We are using a large configurations interaction (CI) method, where
the CI space is specifically optimized to obtain accurate energy differences.
We show that the system can be seen as a
two-dimensional asymmetric triangular Heisenberg lattice where the effective
sites represent delocalized rung entities supporting the magnetic
electrons.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure
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