Magnetic transitions and site-disordered induced weak ferromagnetism in (1-x)BiFeO3-xBaTiO3

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Date
2014-01-31
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Publisher
American Physical Society
Abstract
We present evidence for weak ferromagnetism in both the rhombohedral and cubic compositions of BF-x BT solid solutions for x  < 0.55. Rietveld refinement of nuclear and magnetic structures reveals that the G -type antiferromagnetic ordering of the Fe 3+ magnetic sublattice survives up to x  ∼ 0.50. We address the issue of weak ferromagnetism due to spin canting, which is allowed by the symmetry in the R 3c space group but not in the cubic Pm3 ¯ m space group. It is shown that the local symmetry of the average cubic compositions of BF-x BT for 0.35 < x  < 0.55 is broken due to off-centering of Bi 3+ in the (1-10) plane and O 2− along the ⟨110⟩ direction from their special Wyckoff positions at (0,0,0) and (1/2,1/2,0), respectively. The local O 2− disorder is shown to be equivalent to local antiferrodistortive rotation, leading to deviation of the Fe 3+ -O 2− -Fe 3+ bond angle from 180° that allows spin canting due to Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction D ⃗ i,j ⋅(S ⃗ i ×S ⃗ j ) , which is otherwise irreconcilable with the ideal cubic symmetry. The magnetization and neutron powder diffraction measurements confirm the absence of magnetic ordering at room temperature for x  ≳ 0.55. ©2014 American Physical Society
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Keywords
Ferromagnetism, Magnetization, Neutron diffraction, Spin, Temperature range, Cubic lattices
Citation
Singh, A., Senyshyn, A., Fuess, H., Kennedy, S. J., & Pandey, D. . (2014). Magnetic transitions and site-disordered induced weak ferromagnetism in (1-x)BiFeO3-xBaTiO3. Physical Review B, 89(2), 024108. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.89.024108
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