Real-space visualization of short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in a magnetically enhanced thermoelectric

Recent advances in designing thermoelectric materials

“…7,[235][236][237][238][239] Several outstanding reviews have described the theory of thermoelectrics and traditional transport models in detail. 1,4,235,[240][241][242][243][244][245][246][247] These strategies have led to the discovery of many interesting classes of materials with superior thermoelectric performance, such as skutterudites, clathrates, half-Heusler alloys, transition metal chalcogenides, zinc phases and oxides, which have been represented in various notable reviews. [248][249][250][251] Additionally, there are comprehensive reviews on advanced thermoelectric material processing methods, such as thin films, self-sustaining heating synthesis, melt spinning, and field-assisted sintering.…”

diffpy.mpdf: open-source software for magnetic pair distribution function analysis

“…MnTe has a hexagonal crystal structure and orders magnetically below T N = 307 K, with the moments aligned ferromagnetically within the ab plane and antiferromagnetically along the c axis (Kunitomi et al, 1964). Short-range antiferromagnetic correlations are known to persist to high temperatures well into the paramagnetic phase (Zheng et al, 2019;Baral et al, 2022).…”

“…Details are provided in the Appendix. An anisotropic correlation length of this type was recently used to describe the short-range magnetic correlations in the antiferromagnetic semiconductor MnTe (Baral et al, 2022).…”

“…The method can be used for both powder samples and single crystals (Roth et al, 2018), the latter case yielding the three-dimensional difference magnetic pair distribution function (3D-∆mPDF). Magnetic PDF analysis has been successfully applied to the study of long-and short-range magnetic correlations in numerous magnetic systems, including strongly correlated electron systems (Frandsen & Billinge, 2015;Frandsen et al, 2016a;Frandsen et al, 2020), geometrically frustrated magnets (Frandsen et al, 2017;Roth et al, 2019;Lefrançois et al, 2019;Dun et al, 2021), spin glass systems (Zhang et al, 2019), technologically relevant ferromagnets and antiferromagnets (Frandsen et al, 2016b;Kodama et al, 2017;Baral et al, 2022), and others (Tripathi et al, 2019). Here, we present diffpy.mpdf, the first full-featured, open-access software package for mPDF analysis.…”

Spinteract: A Program to Refine Magnetic Interactions to Diffuse Scattering Data

“…Traditionally, diffuse-scattering analysis approaches were developed specifically for the problem at hand, because general-purpose software was not available. Recently, programs to analyse magnetic diffuse-scattering data have been developed that fit local spin arrangements directly to experimental data, using either "big box" methods such as reverse Monte Carlo refinement [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33], or "small box" methods such as magnetic pair-distribution function analysis [34][35][36][37][38]. These approaches aim to describe the correlations between spin pairs using methods familiar from crystalstructure refinement, and have provided important insights into the physics of disordered magnetic states, from magnetic nanoparticles [36] to emergent partial magnetic ordering [39].…”