It has been for a while. I am doing OK…. Since the last post, almost a year passed. I can’t believe it. I am still doing physics. we are currently working more on writing papers since I need to have more papers to get promoted. I will have a deadline for application of the promotion. I would like to have a few more papers for this application.
Other than that, I am doing good. I have done many good experiments this year and also I like writing these papers. To be honest, I should have been writing more, I have too much data to get out. As a professional physicist, the most important and difficult job has been publishing papers. Now, I am working on it. If I can be a good writer, my whole mission as a physicist was done. This would be my final project. I think I am getting there.
I am enjoying now all the process now. I think the quality of physics research has improved a lot in the last decade. I am feeling I am doing experiments which are good enough to publish data. I know how I can do the research now, only I need to improve is just to keep writing and getting it published. So this year, I will focus on this.
These days, I am working one of interesting project using RCrO3 (R = rare earth). We got many large single crystal samples for this system. I am happy to study these samples because there is not much progress in this field for 50 years since the availability of large single crystal samples. Our group have succeeded making large crystals for the whole system. It is time to perform a lot of experiments on them. This is a huge opportunity, maybe only once in my life. So I am excited to work on these samples and hopefully I am getting more so I can understand the whole family of this so called orthochromites.
Since we haven’t had large single crystal samples, there is no inelastic neutron scattering work. The many of theoretical and experimental work have been done in 1970’s, however, spin Hamiltonian has not been investigated especially to explain mechanism of spin reorientations observed in this orthochromites. In physical point of view, orthochromites are similar to orthoferrites which have been studied greatly. So firstly, we can start working on the orthochromites by comparing to orthoferrites. In this compound, there are two magnetic atoms in the unitcell, so there are interaction between these Cr3+ and R3+. Namely, spin Hamiltonian should be written as below,
H = H_{Cr^{3+}-Cr^{3+}}+ H_{R^{3+}-Cr^{3+}} + H_{R^{3+}-R^{3+}}
Here, the important term is the second one. Relatively weaker than the first one. And third term can be negligible because the energy scale of the third term is much weaker than the temperature we are investigating. So let’s do this. Maybe I will write more about this here in the future. It will take a lot of time to understand but it will be fun. I can learn the theory by writing here slowly. Hopefully.