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Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 156407 (2004) [4 pages]

Orbital and Spin Chains in ZnV2O4

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S.-H. Lee1, D. Louca2, H. Ueda3, S. Park4, T. J. Sato3, M. Isobe3, Y. Ueda3, S. Rosenkranz5, P. Zschack6, J. Íñiguez1, Y. Qiu1, and R. Osborn5
1NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA
2Department of Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, USA
3Institute for Solid State Physics, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8581, Japan
4HANARO Center, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea
5Material Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA
6Frederick-Seitz Materials Research Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois 61801, USA

Received 29 March 2004; published 7 October 2004

Our powder inelastic neutron scattering data indicate that ZnV2O4 is a system of spin chains that are three-dimensionally tangled in the cubic phase above 50 K due to randomly occupied t2g orbitals of V3+ (3d2) ions. Below 50 K in the tetragonal phase, the chains become straight due to antiferro-orbital ordering. This is evidenced by the characteristic wave vector dependence of the magnetic structure factor that changes from symmetric to asymmetric at the cubic-to-tetragonal transition.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.156407
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.156407
PACS:
71.70.Ej, 71.27.+a, 75.50.Ee, 78.70.Nx
 
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