Phonon spectrum of SrFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$ determined using multizone phonon refinement
ORAL
Abstract
The ferropnictide superconductors exhibit a sensitive interplay between the lattice and magnetic degrees of freedom, including a number of phonon modes are much softer than predicted by nonmagnetic calculations using density functional theory (DFT). However, it is not known what effect, if any, the long-range magnetic order has on phonon frequencies above 23~meV, where several phonon branches are very closely spaced in energy and it is challenging to isolate them from each other. We measured these phonons using inelastic time-of-flight neutron scattering in $\approx$ 40~Brillouin zones, and developed a technique to determine their frequencies. We find this method capable of determining phonon energies to better than 0.1~meV accuracy, and that the DFT calculations using the experimental structure yield qualitatively correct energies and eigenvectors. We do not find any effect of the magnetic transition on these phonons.
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