Stuffed Rare Earth Garnets

Abstract

We report the synthesis and magnetic characterization of stuffed rare earth gallium garnets, RE3+xGa5-xO12 (RE=Lu, Yb, Er, Dy, Gd), for x up to 0.5. The excess rare earth ions partly fill the octahedral sites normally fully occupied by Ga3+, forming disordered pairs of corner-shared face-sharing magnetic tetrahedra. The Curie-Weiss constants and observed effective moments per rare earth are smaller than are seen for the unstuffed gallium garnets. No significant change in the field-dependent magnetization is observed but missing entropy is seen when integrating the low-temperature heat capacity to 0.5 K.