Browsing by Author "Silk, R"

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    Exploring the pyrophosphate series K2Cu1-xFexP2O7
    (Australian Institute of Physics, 2020-02-04) Silk, R; Avdeev, M; Sauceda Flores, JA; Ulrich, C; Söhnel, T
    Phosphate materials are of great interest to materials science. Metal phosphate compounds are known to exhibit conductive properties for battery use [1], photocatalytic abilities to decompose other compounds [2], the ability to conduct protons [3], etc. High temperature sintering techniques were used to produce the diphosphate series K2Cu1-xFexP2O7. The material forms two different modifications, a tetragonal (P-421m) and an orthorhombic modification (Pbnm) as shown in Figure 1. The crystal structure was determined through the use of powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD). PXRD patterns show a shift in peaks to lower angles with increasing iron content, which is consistent with an increase of lattice constant parameters. The presence of additional phases such as KPO3 can also be observed. UV-Vis measurements show how the transitions change which increasing amounts of iron and different modifications. Tauc plots revealed that the material has a direct band gap of approximately 3 eV. IR measurements revealed that water had been absorbed by the material and there a slight shift in peak position with increasing iron content. First magnetic measurements did not show any long-range ordering down to 2 K, the compounds remained paramagnetic. The K2CuP2O7 and K2Cu0.75Fe0.25P2O7 samples show short-range antiferromagnetic contribution across both modifications.