Synthesis, structure and magnetic ordering of the mullite-type Bi2Fe4-xCrxO9 solid solutions with frustrated pentagonal Cairo latticeстатья
Статья опубликована в высокорейтинговом журнале
Информация о цитировании статьи получена из
Web of Science,
Scopus
Статья опубликована в журнале из списка Web of Science и/или Scopus
Дата последнего поиска статьи во внешних источниках: 5 сентября 2016 г.
Аннотация:Abstract Highly homogeneous mullite-type solid solutions Bi2Fe4-xCrxO9 (x = 0.5, 1, 1.2) were synthesized using soft chemistry technique followed by solid-state reaction in Ar. The crystal structure of Bi2Fe3CrO9 was investigated using X-ray and neutron powder diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy (S.G. Pbam, a = 7.95579(9)Å, b = 8.39145(9)Å, c = 5.98242(7)Å, RF(X-ray) = 0.022, RF(neutron) = 0.057). The ab planes in the structure are tessellated with distorted pentagonal loops built up by three tetrahedrally coordinated Fe sites and two octahedrally coordinated Fe/Cr sites, linked together in the ab plane by corner-sharing forming a pentagonal Cairo lattice. Magnetic susceptibility measurements and powder neutron diffraction show that the compounds order antiferromagnetically (AFM) with the Néel temperatures decreasing upon increasing the Cr content from TN ~ 250K for x = 0 to TN ~ 155K for x = 1.2. The magnetic structure of Bi2Fe3CrO9 at T = 30K is characterized by a propagation vector k = (1/2,1/2,1/2). The tetrahedrally coordinated Fe cations form singlet pairs within dimers of corner-sharing tetrahedra, but spins on the neighboring dimers are nearly orthogonal. The octahedrally coordinated (Fe,Cr) cations form antiferrimagnetic up-up-down-down chains along c, while the spin arragenment in the ab plane is nearly orthogonal between nearest neighbors and collinear between second neighbors. The resulting magnetic structure is remarkably different from the one in pure Bi2Fe4O9 and features several types of spin correlations even on crystallographically equivalent exchange that may be caused by the simultaneous presence of Fe and Cr on the octahedral site.