Growth and characterization of CaCu3Ru4O12 single crystal**Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2012CB821404), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51172166 and 61106005), the National Science Fund for Talent Training in Basic Science of China (Grant No. J1210061), and the Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 20110141110007).

Abstract

High-quality single crystals of A-site ordered perovskite oxides CaCu3Ru4O12 were synthesized by flux method with CuO serving as a flux. The typical size of these single crystals was around 1 × 1 × 1 mm3 and the lattice constant was determined to be 7.430±0.0009 Å by using x-ray single crystal diffraction. The surfaces of the samples were identified to be (100) surface. The high quality of the single crystal samples was confirmed by the rocking curve data which have a full width at half maximum of approximately 0.02 degree. The x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurement was performed and the temperature-dependent specific heat, magnetic susceptibility, and electric resistivity were measured along the [100] direction of the single crystals. All these measurements showed that the physical properties of CaCu3Ru4O12 single crystals are similar to that of polycrystals. However, the single crystals have a lower Curie susceptibility tail and a smaller residual resistivity than polycrystals, which indicates that the amount of paramagnetic impurities can be controlled by tuning the number of defects in CaCu3Ru4O12 samples.