Influence of Substitution of the Magnetic 3d Metals for Mn in Perovskite La0.67Ca0.33Mn0.90TM0.10O3 (TM = Fe, Co, Ni) Compounds

Influence of substitution of 3d metals for Mn on properties of La0.67Ca0.33Mn0.9 TM0.1O3 (TM = Fe, Co, Ni) compounds was studied. Ferromagnetic – paramagnetic and metals – insulator transitions were significantly affected by Mn-site substitution. However, no observable difference was found in their crystal structure from X-ray diffraction analysis. At room temperature the structure characterization of these compounds gave the single phase and structure is the distortion orthorhombic cell with space group symmetry Pnma. The magnetoresistance measurement showed that the magnetoresistance ratio MR increases until 17% in magnetic field of 0.4 T, and in low magnetic field region (μoH < 0.05 T), MR = 7.5% at 102 K. The investigations of EPR showed that the intensity of resonance line can be well fitted by the expression: I(T) = Ioexp(Ea/kBT). The values of activation energy have been determined with Ea = 0.074 eV, 0.093 eV and 0.086 eV for substituted Fe, Co, Ni samples, respectively. These values are slightly smaller than the value of Ea = 0.12 eV for La0.67Ca0.33MnO3. We attribute the reason to the reduction of Mn3+ content caused by TM substitution for Mn. The dependence transition temperatures and transport properties of all samples are well explained by introducing the SE interaction with considering that the Fe3+, Co3+ and Ni2+ ions have high-spin configuration, the local DOS near the Fermi level at the TM site Nx(Ef ) would decrease from Ni to Co and Fe [1], thus reduces the hopping probability and increases the resistivity in order.