Experimental access to elastic and thermodynamic properties of RbMnFe(CN)6

Abstract

We use spectroscopic ellipsometry to study the elastic and thermodynamic properties of the structural first-order transition of the cooperative Jahn–Teller solid, RbMn[Fe(CN)6]. While the analysis of the thermal dependence of the dielectric constant revealed a remarkable energy shift in the metal-to-ligand charge transfer band, that of the refractive index allowed to evaluate the volumetric thermal expansion coefficient in the two phases through the Gladstone–Dale relation. The access to the elastic properties of the solid is obtained with the reflectivity under pressure measurements, from which we estimated the bulk modulus values in the low- and high-temperature phases as BLT=30(±3) GPa and BHT=23(±2) GPa, respectively. Assuming the system is isotropic, the corresponding Debye temperature values have been found to be θDLT(SE)≃360(±25) K and θDHT(SE)≃290(±20) K, in good agreement with those derived from independent Mössbauer spectrometry investigations which led to θDLT(Moss)≃332(±7) K and θDHT(Moss)≃280(±11) K. Moreover, we have been able to extract from the SE data, the entropy change at the transition, ΔS≈64 J K−1 mol−1, which has been also found in good agreement with the value, ΔS≈60±5 J K−1 mol−1, derived from calorimetric experiments performed in this work.