| A Walker-type multianvil high-pressure facility is capable of high-pressure syntheses and measurements beyond 10 GPa and has been utilized in my research to synthesize the 4d Ruthenium and Rhodium and the 5d Iridium oxides with the perovskite-related structures. Under high-pressure and high-temperature conditions, these families of oxides can be enlarged to a great extent so that enables us not only to address the long-standing problem about ferromagnetism in the perovskite ruthenates but also explore new phenomena associated with the structural and electronic properties in the iridates and rhodates.In the perovskite ruthenates ARuO3 (A= Ca, Sr, and Ba), a systematic study of the variations of the ferromagnetic transition temperature Tc and the critical isothermal magnetization as a function of the average A-site cation size and the size variance as well as external high pressures reveals explicitly the crucial role of the local lattice strain and disorder on Tc and the nature of the localized-electron ferromagnetism. However, such a steric effect is dominated by the electronic effect in another perovskite ruthenate PbRuO3, which is a paramagnetic metal down to 1.8 K and undergoes a first-order structural transition to a low-temperature Imma phase at Tt &ap 90 K. Bandwidth broadening due to orbital hybridization between Pb-6s and Ru-4d plays an important role in suppressing the ferromagnetism in the Sr1-zPbzRuO3 system. The high-pressure sequence of the 9R-BaIrO3 was explored and three more polytypes, i.e. 5H, 6H and 3C, were identified under 10 GPa. With increasing fraction of the corner- to face-sharing IrO6/2 octahedra, the ground states of BaIrO3 evolve from a ferromagnetic insulator with Tc &ap 180 K in the 9R phase to a ferromagnetic metal with Tc &ap 50 K in the 5H phase, and finally to an exchange-enhanced paramagnetic metal near a quantum critical point in the 6H phase. In addition to the perovskite SrRhO3, a new 6H polytype was synthesized for the first time under high pressure and a pressure-temperature phase diagram was given for the 6H-perovskite transformation. Restoration of the Curie-Weiss behavior in the high-temperature magnetic susceptibility chi(T) of the perovskite SrRhO3 resolves the puzzle about unusual dependence of chi -1 &prop T2 reported earlier and highlights the importance of spin-orbit coupling in the 4d and 5d transition-metal oxides. |
