Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Materials Science
Session: 3
Room: Park Tower 8216
Jonathan Valenzuela - Norfolk State University
Co-Author(s): Kory Wells, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA, Leroy Salary, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA, and Doyle Temple, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA
Materials exhibiting insulator-metal transitions (IMT) are of great interest for understanding correlated electron physics. Investigation of these effects requires high quality, bulk single crystals. In this talk we report single-crystal growth of a CaFe2O4 by the floating-zone method. Polycrystalline powder with a nominal composition of 0.53 Fe2O3 and 0.47 CaO was prepared from 99.99% Aldrich chemicals. The resulting powder was densified by packing it into latex tubes and hydrostatically pressing the them in a water filled steel container. High-density 8 mm diameter, 90 mm length rods were obtained which were sintered in an aluminum oxide tube in air at 1100 C. The sintered polycrystalline rods were mounted in a four- mirror floating-zone furnace (FZ-T-10000-H-HR-I-VPO-PC, Crystal Systems Corporation) in which we used the traveling-solvent floating zone (TSFZ) method to obtain single crystalline samples of CaFe2O4. XRD characterization of the resulting samples was used to confirm the crystal structure. Future work will include growth in high pressure O2 atmospheres in an effort to avoid the introduction of oxygen vacancies during crystal growth.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This research was funded by NSF-HBCU-UP EIR grant Number 1832031, Single Crystal Growth and Investigation of Novel Exotic Fermion Materials and NSF-PREM Grant Number 1827847, PREM for Functional Nanomaterials
Faculty Advisor: Doyle Temple, datemple@nsu.edu
Role: I performed all of the materials preparation and crystal growth.