To explore the size effect in electron-doped La 0 4 Ca 0 6 MnO 3 (LCMO) compound, dc magnetic measurements and electron magnetic resonance were carried out with bulk and nano-grained LCMO in temperature ranges 5 K 350 K and 5 K 600 K, respectively. It appears that the antiferromagnetic, charge ordered state remains stable upon the reduction of the samples size down to nanometer scale. However, the low-temperature ferromagnetic (FM) component enhances in nano-grained LCMO as compared to its bulk counterpart, supposedly due to strong surface and inter-grain interaction effects. FM correlations in bulk and nano crystals are strong at paramagnetic (PM) state, which seems to be an electron-doping effect. The domination of ion-ion spin relaxation mechanism in PM state and drastic fading of the FM correlations upon cooling means that the doped electrons are localized in both bulk and nanograined LCMO. The notable influence of the oxygen stoichiometry on magnetic ordering in LCMO, revealed in this work, may explain the contradictive data on the magnetic state of nano-crystalline LCMO reported in the literature.
Index Terms-Magneticresonance, magnetization processes, manganese compounds, nanotechnology. T HE magnetic ground state in electron-doped La Ca MnO manganites is characterized by strong antiferromagnetic (AFM) component. The charge ordered (CO) state appears in such manganites upon heating. In particular, bulk La Ca MnO (LCMO) compound shows the critical temperatures of the AFM and CO phase transitions 150 K and 260 K, respectively [1]. It was reported [2] that the LCMO powders with mean grain size about 60 and 20 nm demonstrate dramatic change in their magnetic ordering as compared to bulk, i.e., ferromagnetic (FM) like ground state with spontaneous magnetization 1 /f.u. at 5 K is observed. At the same time, data by Zhang et al. [3] evidence that AFM/CO state continues to exist in electron-doped La Ca MnO nano-powders, while the CO transition gradually shifts to lower temperatures and becomes wider upon decrease of particle size. It is commonly accepted now that mixed valence doped manganites are characterized by strong coupling of spin, charge, and lattice degrees of freedom [4]. This means that magnetic/electronic ordering of such compounds may really be sensitive to a reduction of the samples dimensions down to nanometer size scale due to, e.g., spin-lattice coupling. The recent results, obtained on hole-doped La Ca MnO , definitely show that nano-powder has notably different FM like magnetic ground state as compared to the mixed one in its bulk counterpart [5], while both nano and bulk samples are characterized by about the same FM order [6], i.e., the tendency of weakening of the size-induced effects on magnetic ordering upon its stabilization is observed. The AFM/CO order in electron-doped La Ca MnO manganites is known to be very stable regarding external Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2008.2002197 perturbations [4]. This allows one to conclude that the above noted data by Lu et al. [2] seems to be...