| Identifiers | |
|---|---|
3D model (JSmol) | |
| |
| |
| Properties | |
| Cu2OSeO3 | |
| Molar mass | 270.059 g/mol |
| Appearance | Green dodecahedral crystals [1] |
| Density | 5.1 g/cm3 [2] |
| Band gap | 2.5 eV [3] |
| Thermal conductivity | 400 W/(m·K) (9 K) [4] |
Refractive index (nD) | 3.8 (100 K, 1 kHz) [2] |
| Structure [2] | |
| Cubic | |
| P213, #198, cP56 | |
a = 0.8924 nm | |
Formula units (Z) | 8 |
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). | |
| Infobox references | |
Copper oxide selenite is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula Cu2OSeO3. It is an electrically insulating, piezoelectric and piezomagnetic material, which becomes a ferrimagnet upon cooling below 58 K. As of 2021, Cu2OSeO3 is the only insulating material that hosts magnetic skyrmions. [1]
Cu2OSeO3 polycrystals can be grown by heating a 2:1 molar mixture of CuO and SeO2 powders at 600 °C for 12 hours in vacuum. They can be converted into olive-green single crystals ca. 4 mm in size by chemical vapor transport. NH4Cl is used as the transport agent; it sublimes at 340 °C, yielding NH3 and HCl gases. [1]
Cu2OSeO3 crystals have a cubic, distorted pyrochlore structure built by Cu4O and SeO3 units. The spins on three Cu2+ ions in each tetrahedron (Cu1 sites) are aligned, while the Cu2 spin is facing in the opposite direction, resulting in a ferrimagnetic order. The helical spin and skyrmion textures emerge at low magnetic fields due to the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. [1]
![Magnetic phase diagram of Cu2OSeO3 for H [?] [111] crystal axis. H, C, FP and SL stand for helical, conical, field-polarized (ferrimagnetic or paramagnetic) and skyrmion lattice phases, respectively. Cu2OSeO3-H-T-diagram.png](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Cu2OSeO3-H-T-diagram.png/330px-Cu2OSeO3-H-T-diagram.png)
Cu2OSeO3 is a ferrimagnet, and all its properties below the Curie temperature strongly depend on magnetic field. With increasing field, its spin texture changes from helical stripes to conical stripes or skyrmion lattice, and then to a "field polarized", i.e., ferrimagnetic alignment. Thermal conductivity peaks around 9 K with a value of ca. 400 W/(m·K). [4] The magnetization damping constant is 1×10−4 at 5 K. This value is only 4 times larger than that of yttrium iron garnet, which has the lowest magnetization damping value among all materials. This property is advantageous for high-frequency electronic applications, as it results in low current-induced heat. [5]
Ferromagnetism is the basic mechanism by which certain materials form permanent magnets, or are attracted to magnets. In physics, several different types of magnetism are distinguished. Ferromagnetism is the strongest type and is responsible for the common phenomenon of magnetism in magnets encountered in everyday life. Substances respond weakly to magnetic fields with three other types of magnetism—paramagnetism, diamagnetism, and antiferromagnetism—but the forces are usually so weak that they can be detected only by sensitive instruments in a laboratory. An everyday example of ferromagnetism is a refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. The attraction between a magnet and ferromagnetic material is "the quality of magnetism first apparent to the ancient world, and to us today".
Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which does not conform to either the conventional BCS theory or Nikolay Bogolyubov's theory or its extensions.
High-temperature superconductors are operatively defined as materials that behave as superconductors at temperatures above 77 K, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, one of the simplest coolants in cryogenics. All materials currently known to superconduct at ordinary pressures become superconducting at temperatures far below ambient, and therefore require cooling. The majority of high-temperature superconductors are ceramic materials. On the other hand, Metallic superconductors usually work below −200 °C: they are then called low-temperature superconductors. Metallic superconductors are also ordinary superconductors, since they were discovered and used before the high-temperature ones.
A magnon is a quasiparticle, a collective excitation of the electrons' spin structure in a crystal lattice. In the equivalent wave picture of quantum mechanics, a magnon can be viewed as a quantized spin wave. Magnons carry a fixed amount of energy and lattice momentum, and are spin-1, indicating they obey boson behavior.
In particle theory, the skyrmion is a topologically stable field configuration of a certain class of non-linear sigma models. It was originally proposed as a model of the nucleon by Tony Skyrme in 1961. As a topological soliton in the pion field, it has the remarkable property of being able to model, with reasonable accuracy, multiple low-energy properties of the nucleon, simply by fixing the nucleon radius. It has since found application in solid-state physics, as well as having ties to certain areas of string theory.
Microwave spectroscopy is the spectroscopy method that employs microwaves, i.e. electromagnetic radiation at GHz frequencies, for the study of matter.
Multiferroics are defined as materials that exhibit more than one of the primary ferroic properties in the same phase:
In physics, topological order is a kind of order in the zero-temperature phase of matter. Macroscopically, topological order is defined and described by robust ground state degeneracy and quantized non-Abelian geometric phases of degenerate ground states. Microscopically, topological orders correspond to patterns of long-range quantum entanglement. States with different topological orders cannot change into each other without a phase transition.
Helimagnetism is a form of magnetic ordering where spins of neighbouring magnetic moments arrange themselves in a spiral or helical pattern, with a characteristic turn angle of somewhere between 0 and 180 degrees. It results from the competition between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic exchange interactions. It is possible to view ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism as helimagnetic structures with characteristic turn angles of 0 and 180 degrees respectively. Helimagnetic order breaks spatial inversion symmetry, as it can be either left-handed or right-handed in nature.
The quantum spin Hall state is a state of matter proposed to exist in special, two-dimensional, semiconductors that have a quantized spin-Hall conductance and a vanishing charge-Hall conductance. The quantum spin Hall state of matter is the cousin of the integer quantum Hall state, and that does not require the application of a large magnetic field. The quantum spin Hall state does not break charge conservation symmetry and spin- conservation symmetry.
Gallium manganese arsenide, chemical formula (Ga,Mn)As is a magnetic semiconductor. It is based on the world's second most commonly used semiconductor, gallium arsenide,, and readily compatible with existing semiconductor technologies. Differently from other dilute magnetic semiconductors, such as the majority of those based on II-VI semiconductors, it is not paramagnetic but ferromagnetic, and hence exhibits hysteretic magnetization behavior. This memory effect is of importance for the creation of persistent devices. In (Ga,Mn)As, the manganese atoms provide a magnetic moment, and each also acts as an acceptor, making it a p-type material. The presence of carriers allows the material to be used for spin-polarized currents. In contrast, many other ferromagnetic magnetic semiconductors are strongly insulating and so do not possess free carriers. (Ga,Mn)As is therefore a candidate as a spintronic material.
A nanomagnet is a submicrometric system that presents spontaneous magnetic order (magnetization) at zero applied magnetic field (remanence).
The 122 iron arsenide unconventional superconductors are part of a new class of iron-based superconductors. They form in the tetragonal I4/mmm, ThCr2Si2 type, crystal structure. The shorthand name "122" comes from their stoichiometry; the 122s have the chemical formula AEFe2Pn2, where AE stands for alkaline earth metal (Ca, Ba, Sr or Eu) and Pn is pnictide (As, P, etc.). These materials become superconducting under pressure and also upon doping. The maximum superconducting transition temperature found to date is 38 K in the Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2. The microscopic description of superconductivity in the 122s is yet unclear.
The Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin–Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase can arise in a superconductor in large magnetic field. Among its characteristics are Cooper pairs with nonzero total momentum and a spatially non-uniform order parameter, leading to normal conducting areas in the superconductor.
In condensed matter physics, a quantum spin liquid is a phase of matter that can be formed by interacting quantum spins in certain magnetic materials. Quantum spin liquids (QSL) are generally characterized by their long-range quantum entanglement, fractionalized excitations, and absence of ordinary magnetic order.
In quantum mechanics, orbital magnetization, Morb, refers to the magnetization induced by orbital motion of charged particles, usually electrons in solids. The term "orbital" distinguishes it from the contribution of spin degrees of freedom, Mspin, to the total magnetization. A nonzero orbital magnetization requires broken time-reversal symmetry, which can occur spontaneously in ferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic materials, or can be induced in a non-magnetic material by an applied magnetic field.
Antisymmetric exchange, also known as the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI), is a contribution to the total magnetic exchange interaction between two neighboring magnetic spins, and . Quantitatively, it is a term in the Hamiltonian which can be written as
A toroidal moment is an independent term in the multipole expansion of electromagnetic fields besides magnetic and electric multipoles. In the electrostatic multipole expansion, all charge and current distributions can be expanded into a complete set of electric and magnetic multipole coefficients. However, additional terms arise in an electrodynamic multipole expansion. The coefficients of these terms are given by the toroidal multipole moments as well as time derivatives of the electric and magnetic multipole moments. While electric dipoles can be understood as separated charges and magnetic dipoles as circular currents, axial toroidal dipoles describes toroidal charge arrangements whereas polar toroidal dipole correspond to the field of a solenoid bent into a torus.
Strontium ruthenate (SRO) is an oxide of strontium and ruthenium with the chemical formula Sr2RuO4. It was the first reported perovskite superconductor that did not contain copper. Strontium ruthenate is structurally very similar to the high-temperature cuprate superconductors, and in particular, is almost identical to the lanthanum doped superconductor (La, Sr)2CuO4. However, the transition temperature for the superconducting phase transition is 0.93 K (about 1.5 K for the best sample), which is much lower than the corresponding value for cuprates.
In physics, magnetic skyrmions are quasiparticles which have been predicted theoretically and observed experimentally in condensed matter systems. Skyrmions, named after British physicist Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme, can be formed in magnetic materials in their 'bulk' such as in MnSi, or in magnetic thin films. They can be achiral, or chiral in nature, and may exist both as dynamic excitations or stable or metastable states. Although the broad lines defining magnetic skyrmions have been established de facto, there exist a variety of interpretations with subtle differences.