Fe cation occupancies in GaFeO₃prepared by sol–gel and solid state reaction

Abstract

Abstract In this study, the Mössbauer spectroscopy and the neutron powder diffraction were used for the characterisation of GaFeO3 samples prepared by two different methods, solid state reaction and sol–gel synthesis. The samples have similar structures that differ in distributions of Fe and Ga among the pertinent sites. The samples also differ in magnetic transition temperatures. We studied how to adopt the method of invariants, developed earlier for decomposition of the Mössbauer spectra into site components, to the case of magnetic interactions dominating over small quadrupole interactions. A combined neutron and Mössbauer data analysis has led to the determination of site assignment and the occupancies. Keywords: Mössbauer spectroscopyneutron powder diffractionmultiferroicsGaFeO3 Acknowledgements One of the authors (M. Bakr Mohamed) thanks the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Technology for providing the research grant. This study was partially supported by the funds allocated for scientific research for the years 2008–2011 as a research project NN202172335.