The role of static disorder in negative thermal expansion in ReO3

Abstract

Time-of-flight neutron powder diffraction and specific heat measurements were used to study the nature of thermal expansion in rhenium trioxide, an electrically conducting oxide with cubic symmetry. The temperature evolution of the lattice parameters show that ReO3 can exhibit negative thermal expansion at low temperatures and that the transition from negative to positive thermal expansion depends on sample preparation; the single crystal sample demonstrated the highest transition temperature, 300 K, and largest negative value for the coefficient of thermal expansion, alpha = -1.1(1)x 10^-6 K^-1. For the oxygen atoms, the atomic displacement parameters are strongly anisotropic even at 15 K, indicative of a large contribution of static disorder to the displacement parameters. Further inspection of the temperature evolution of the oxygen displacement parameters for different samples reveals that the static disorder contribution is greater for the samples with diminished NTE behavior. In addition, specific heat measurements show that ReO3 lacks the low energy Einstein-type modes seen in other negative thermal expansion oxides such as ZrW2O8.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• A density-functional study of charge doping in WO3
• Unusual Low-Energy Phonon Dynamics in the Negative Thermal Expansion Compound ZrW2O8

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• Landau theory and giant room-temperature barocaloric effect in MF${}_3$ metal trifluorides
• Negative thermal expansion near the precipice of structural stability in open perovskites
• Local structure of ReO${}_3$ at ambient pressure from neutron total scattering study
• Soft mode anisotropy in negative thermal expansion material ReO${}_3$