Nucleation and growth of orbital ordering.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32393903.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-16004-2 and PMC identifier 7214450.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The dynamics of the first-order phase transitions involving a large displacement of atoms, for example, a liquid-solid transition, is generally dominated by the nucleation of the ordered phase and the growth of the nuclei, where the interfacial energy between the two phases plays an important role. On the other hand, electronic phase transitions seldom exhibit such a nucleation-growth behavior, probably because two-phase coexistence is not dominated by only the interfacial energy in such phase transitions. In the present paper, we report that the dynamics of a phase transition associated with an ordering of d orbitals in a vanadate exhibits a clear nucleation-growth behavior and that the interfacial energy between the orbital-ordered and -disordered phases dominated by the orbital-spin coupling can be experimentally obtained.