An x-ray absorption spectroscopic study of the electronic structure and bonding of rare-earth orthoferrites

Rare-earth orthoferrites, REFeO₃ (RE D rare earth; Y), are tremendously adaptable compounds that are being investigated for use in a wide variety of applications including gas sensors, vehicle catalytic converters, and solid-oxide fuel cells. They also exhibit interesting magnetic properties such as high-temperature antiferromagnetism, making them useful for data storage applications. The compounds adopt a distorted perovskite-type structure where the tilt angle of the octahedra increases (Fe-O-Fe bond angle decreases) as the size of the rare-earth atom decreases. Despite intensive study of the physical properties of these compounds, very few studies have investigated how the bonding and electronic structure of these systems change with substitution of the RE. X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) is a technique well-suited for such a study, and, in view of this, Fe L-, Fe K- and O K-edge spectra from a series of REFeO₃ compounds (RE D La, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Ho, Yb, Y) have been collected, and are presented here. Fe L-edge spectra show that Fe is octahedrally coordinated and that the Fe-centered octahedra do not appear to distort with changes in the identity of the RE. The Fe K-edge spectra contain an intersite hybrid peak, which is an ill-studied feature that is attributed to non-local transitions of 1s electrons to 3d states on the next-nearest-neighbor atom that are hybridized with 4p states on the absorbing atom through O 2p states. In this study, it is shown that the intensity of this feature is strongly dependent on the Fe-O-Fe bond angle; the lower the Fe-O-Fe bond angle, the less intense the intersite hybrid peak is.