Structural and Magnetic Behaviour of PrCrO3 at High Pressure

The application of hydrostatic pressure tunes the interatomic separations within a compound, causing changes in the electronic structure. This alters many other material properties, such as the form of magnetic ordering. With pressure tuning, properties can often be more rapidly and cleanly optimised than with chemical tuning, which necessitates the exploratory synthesis of a large number of different materials. We propose to study the changes which pressure has on the magnetic and structural behaviour of PrCrO3. At ambient pressure the material is anti-ferromagnetic material and crystallises with orthorhombic symmetry (space group Pnma) see Figure 2. Room temperature compression will allow us to study purely structural phenomena in the sample, whilst compression below the Neel temperature will allow us to determine changes in the magnetic ordering with applied pressure.