Growth and characterization of large (Y,La)TiO${}_3$ and (Y,Ca)TiO${}_3$ single crystals

Abstract

The Mott-insulating rare-earth titanates (RTiO${}_3$, R being a rare-earth ion) are an important class of materials that encompasses interesting spin-orbital phases as well as ferromagnet-antiferromagnet and insulator-metal transitions. The growth of these materials has been plagued by difficulties related to overoxidation, which arises from a strong tendency of Ti${}^{3+}$ to oxidize to Ti${}^{4+}$. We describe our efforts to grow sizable single crystals of YTiO${}_3$ and its La-substituted and Ca-doped variants with the optical travelling-solvent floating-zone technique. We present sample characterization $via$ chemical composition analysis, magnetometry, charge transport, neutron scattering, x-ray absorption spectroscopy and x-ray magnetic circular dichroism to understand macroscopic physical property variations associated with overoxidation. Furthermore, we demonstrate a good signal-to-noise ratio in inelastic magnetic neutron scattering measurements of spin-wave excitations. A superconducting impurity phase, found to appear in Ca-doped samples at high doping levels, is identified as TiO.

References in corpus (7)

• Hybridization-controlled charge transfer and induced magnetism at correlated oxide interfaces
• Orbital Physics in the Perovskite Ti Oxides
• Enhanced Superconductivity in TiO Epitaxial Thin Films
• Carrier-controlled ferromagnetism in SrTiO3
• Nature of the ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic transition in Y${}_{1-x}$La${}_x$TiO${}_3$
• Two-component electronic phase separation in the doped Mott insulator Y${}_{1-x}$Ca${}_x$TiO${}_3$
• Ferroelectric quantum criticality and enhanced superconductivity in plastically deformed strontium titanate

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Uniaxial strain control of bulk ferromagnetism in rare-earth titanates
• Effect of random antiferromagnetic exchange on the spin waves in a three-dimensional Heisenberg ferromagnet
• Magnetic resonance study of rare-earth titanates