Award Date

8-1-2020

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Committee Member

Andrew Cornelius

Second Committee Member

Ravhi Kumar

Third Committee Member

Ashkan Salamat

Fourth Committee Member

Oliver Tschauner

Fifth Committee Member

Thomas Hartmann

Number of Pages

70

Abstract

This work combines high pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD), nuclear forward scattering (NFS), and nuclear resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (NRIXS) experiments on iron diantimonide (FeSb2), a promising thermoelectric material. NRIXS uses the interaction between excited nuclear and lattice states to directly measure the phonon density of states (PDOS) for samples containing certain Mössbauer isotopes. For our experiments, we synthesized FeSb2 enriched with the isotope 57Fe and measured the partial PDOS for 57Fe sites in the FeSb2 lattice. NFS, also known as synchrotron Mössbauer spectroscopy, is a sister technique to NRIXS that studies the hyperfine structure of the excited Mössbauer nuclei. High pressure XRD experiments provide complementary information on the crystal structure of FeSb2. Samples were pressurized with symmetric-style and panoramic-style diamond anvil cells. High pressure experiments were conducted at Sector 16 of the Argonne National Laboratory Advanced Photon Source.

Keywords

High pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD); Nuclear forward scattering (NFS); Nuclear resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (NRIXS)

Disciplines

Condensed Matter Physics

File Format

pdf

File Size

2100 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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