Effect of the magnetic impurity on the charge diffusion in highly dilute Ce doped LaMnO3

Abstract

LaMnO3+δ is a complex oxide, which, depending on the oxygen excess concentration, presents different crystalline structure and interesting magnetic and electric properties such as colossal magnetoresistance, polaron dynamics, multiferroic behavior, and charge-orbital ordering. This complexity requires different characterization techniques to draw a picture as complete as possible allowing a good understanding of these phenomena. Here, we have used the perturbed angular correlation (PAC) technique to measure hyperfine interactions at La and Mn sites of LaMnO3+δ(δ ∼0.15) using 140Ce and 111Cd at La sites as probe nuclei in order to investigate within an atomic scale the magnetic and electric interactions in this compound. The results show that 111Cd nuclei occupy highly symmetric local sites in agreement with a rhombohedral structure. The magnetic hyperfine field (Bhf ) measured with 111Cd at La sites is very small (Bhf = 0.40 T) due to the supertransferred magnetic field from Mn neighbors through oxygen orbitals. On the other hand, 140Ce nuclei at La sites present a saturation field of around 3.7 T much higher than that expected for La sites (due to the weak transfer field by superexchange mechanism). In addition, for temperature range above the magnetic ordering (200-300 K) a dynamic hyperfine interaction was observed characterized by the attenuation parameter λ(T) whose temperature dependence allowed to determine the activation energy (Ea) associated to charge transfer. The polarization of the 4f -electron of Ce impurities affects the local magnetic field at impurity sites as well as the Ea.