1. Anomalous phonons in CaFe2As2explored by inelastic neutron scattering
- Author
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S. L. Chaplot, S. K. Dhar, Neeraj Kumar, Ranjan Mittal, Daniel Lamago, A. Thamizhavel, Klaus Peter Bohnen, Dmitry Reznik, Lothar Pintschovius, Yixi Su, Rolf Heid, and Th. Brueckel
- Subjects
Superconductivity ,Physics ,History ,Condensed matter physics ,Phonon scattering ,Phonon ,Anharmonicity ,Inelastic neutron scattering ,Computer Science Applications ,Education ,Condensed Matter::Materials Science ,Condensed Matter::Superconductivity ,Condensed Matter::Strongly Correlated Electrons ,Density functional theory ,Local-density approximation ,Single crystal - Abstract
Extensive inelastic neutron scattering measurements of phonons on a single crystal of CaFe2As2 allowed us to establish a fairly complete picture of phonon dispersions in the main symmetry directions. The phonon spectra were also calculated by density functional theory (DFT) in the local density approximation (LDA). There are serious discrepancies between calculations done for the optimized structure and experiment, because the optimised structure is not the ambient pressure structure but is very close to the collapsed structure reached at p = 3.5 kbar. However, if the experimental crystal structure is used the calculation gives correct frequencies of most phonons. The most important new result is that linewidths/frequencies of certain modes are larger/softer than predicted by DFT-LDA. We also observed strong temperature dependence of some phonons near the structural phase transition near 172 K. This behavior may indicate anomalously strong electron phonon coupling and/or anharmonicity, which may be important to the mechanism of superconductivity.
- Published
- 2010