Diffraction Studies

In recent years, a great interest has been devoted to strongly correlated systems containing perovskite building blocks. These systems exhibit a complex interplay between charge, spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom paving the way for very attractive applications. "Diffraction Studies - Strongly Correlated Perovskite Oxides¿ presents several applications of x-ray diffraction techniques to investigate the coupling between the structure and the physical properties of several bulk materials based on perovskite structure. The book is organized in five chapters. Introduction presents a very general overview on strongly correlated perovskite oxides while the first chapter reports technical details of the techniques involved. The following chapters report examples to show how diffraction can be used to assign the correct space group, to demonstrate the existence of hidden coupling between structural phase transition and magnetic, metal to insulator transition or to provide evidence of mismatch between the local and the average crystallographic structures.