Chemically Disordered Metallic Compounds

Apart from the disordered noncollinear spin structures there are also ordered ones. A prominent example of these is the transition-metal compound y-FeMn, which has a magnetic unit cell that is not much larger than the chemical one. On the other hand, magnetic spiral structures, which are quite common in rare earth metals, can possess very large or even infinite magnetic unit cells. 

Two metals that are chemically related and that have atoms of nearly the same size form disordered alloys with each other. Silver and gold, both crystallizing with cubic closest-packing, have atoms of nearly equal size (radii 144.4 and 144.2 pm). They form solid solutions (mixed crystals) of arbitrary composition in which the silver and the gold atoms randomly occupy the positions of the sphere packing. Related metals, especially from the same group of the periodic table, generally form solid solutions which have any composition if their atomic radii do not differ by more than approximately 15% for example Mo +W, K + Rb, K + Cs, but not Na + Cs. If the elements are less similar, there may be a limited miscibility as in the case of, for example, Zn in Cu (amount-of-substance fraction of Zn maximally 38.4%) and Cu in Zn (maximally 2.3% Cu) copper and zinc additionally form intermetallic compounds (cf. Section 15.4). 

In summary, NMR techniques based upon chemical shifts and dipolar or scalar couplings of spin-1/2 nuclei can provide structural information about bonding environments in semiconductor alloys, and more specifically the extent to which substitutions are completely random, partially or fully-ordered, or even bimodal. Semiconductor alloys containing magnetic ions, typically transition metal ions, have also been studied by spin-1/2 NMR here the often-large frequency shifts are due to the electron hyperfine interaction, and so examples of such studies will be discussed in Sect. 3.5. For alloys containing only quadrupolar nuclei as NMR probes, such as many of the III-V compounds, the nuclear quadrupole interaction will play an important and often dominant role, and can be used to investigate alloy disorder (Sect. 3.8). 

Lithium compounds, not lithium metal, are used in the treatment of some types of mental disorders. The chemical properties of lithium metal are very different from lithium compounds containing the ion, Li+. Li metal is very reactive with water, forming the strong base, LiOH, and hydrogen gas and releasing much heat, none of which are good for the human body. 

While it is to some extent arbitrary, a classification of this kind provides a means of discussing some of the general features now emerging from studies of metallic oxides. We have stressed the evidence that a nonstoichiometric phase is disordered, but may be related to chemically similar phases of fixed composition where an anomaly of structure is ordered and identifiable by x-ray diffraction methods. Where such ordered phases are found, it is possible that features of them are retained as blocks or domains with short range order in the related berthollide. Efforts should be directed towards order-disorder effects, with a view to reconsidering the status of the nonstoichiometric compound with a very wide composition range. 

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