Oxygen ordering and strain-related morphology in YBa2Cu3-xMxO7 systems, where M is a trivalent atom.

Abstract

Monte Carlo simulations were performed on an anisotropic lattice-gas model which well represents the interactions between oxygen atoms in ${\mathrm{YBa}}_{2}$${\mathrm{Cu}}_{3}$${\mathrm{O}}_{7}$ systems doped with trivalent impurity atoms M such as Fe or Al. Concentration wave amplitudes obtained from these simulations were used to calculate the diffuse x-ray scattering intensity caused by the resulting displacement field using a concentration-wave--displacement-wave approach, and the results are compared with x-ray and electron diffraction data. The results suggest that the small orthorhombic domains (short-range ordering) associated with the oxygen ``cross-links'' around impurity atoms M cause the diffuse scattering intensity to fall off with the scattering wave-vector difference q from a Bragg peak as 1/${\mathit{q}}^{2}$ for small q and as 1/${\mathit{q}}^{4}$ for larger q. We show that the average size of such domains can be obtained from diffuse x-ray scattering data.