Tin telluride: A weakly co-elastic metal

We report resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS), dilatometry/magnetostriction, magnetotransport, magnetization, specific-heat, and 119Sn Mössbauer spectroscopy measurements on SnTe and Sn0.995Cr0.005Te. Hall measurements at T=77 K indicate that our Bridgman-grown single crystals have a p-type carrier concentration of 3.4×1019 cm−3 and that our Cr-doped crystals have an n-type concentration of 5.8×1022 cm−3. Although our SnTe crystals are diamagnetic over the temperature range 2≤T≤1100 K, the Cr-doped crystals are room-temperature ferromagnets with a Curie temperature of 294 K. For each sample type, three-terminal capacitive dilatometry measurements detect a subtle 0.5 μm distortion at Tc≈85 K. Whereas our RUS measurements on SnTe show elastic hardening near the structural transition, pointing to co-elastic behavior, similar measurements on Sn0.995Cr0.005Te show a pronounced softening, pointing to ferroelastic behavior. Effective Debye temperature, θD, values of SnTe obtained from 119Sn Mössbauer studies show a hardening of phonons in the range 60–115 K (θD=162 K) as compared with the 100–300 K range (θD=150 K). In addition, a precursor softening extending over approximately 100 K anticipates this collapse at the critical temperature and quantitative analysis over three decades of its reduced modulus finds ΔC44/C44=A|(T−T0)/T0|−κ with κ=0.50±0.02, a value indicating a three-dimensional softening of phonon branches at a temperature T0∼75 K, considerably below Tc. We suggest that the differences in these two types of elastic behaviors lie in the absence of elastic domain-wall motion in the one case and their nucleation in the other.