Enhanced spin-phonon-electronic coupling in a 5d oxide

Enhanced coupling of material properties offers new fundamental insights and routes to multifunctional devices. In this context 5d oxides provide new paradigms of cooperative interactions that drive novel emergent behaviour. This is exemplified in osmates that host metal-insulator transitions where magnetic order appears intimately entwined. Here we consider such a material, the 5d perovskite NaOsO3, and observe a coupling between spin and phonon manifested in a frequency shift of 40 cm(-1), the largest measured in any material. The anomalous modes are shown to involve solely Os-O interactions and magnetism is revealed as the driving microscopic mechanism for the phonon renormalization. The magnitude of the coupling in NaOsO3 is primarily due to a property common to all 5d materials: the large spatial extent of the ion. This allows magnetism to couple to phonons on an unprecedented scale and in general offers multiple new routes to enhanced coupled phenomena in 5d materials.open0

Low energy spin excitations in chromium metal

Neutron scattering experiments with full polarization analysis have been performed with a single crystal of chromium to study the low-energy spin fluctuations in the transverse spin density wave (TSDW) state. A number of remarkable results have been found. Inelastic scattering observed close to the TSDW satellite positions at (1+/-delta,0,0) does not behave as expected for magnon scattering. In particular, the scattering corresponds to almost equally strong magnetization fluctuations both parallel and perpendicular to the ordered moments of the TSDW phase. As the Neel temperature is approached from below, scattering at the commensurate wavevector(1,0,0) increases in intensity as a result of critical scattering at "silent" satellites (1,0,+/-delta) being included within the spectrometer resolution function. This effect, first observed by Sternlieb et al, does not account for all of the inelastic scattering around the (1,0,0) position, however. Rather, there are further collective excitations, apparently emanating from the TSDW satellites, which correspond to magnetic fluctuations parallel to the ordered TSDW moments. These branches have a group velocity that is close to that of (1,0,0) longitudinal acoustic (LA) phonons, but assigning their origin to magneto-elastic scattering raises other unanswered questions