Size-induced effect upon the Néel temperature of the antiferro/paramagnetic transition in gadolinium oxide nanoparticles

In this paper, we demonstrate that cubic gadolinium oxide is paramagnetic and follows the Curie–Weiss law from 20 K to room temperature for particles size comprised between 3.5 and 60 nm. The largest particles (60 nm) possess the macroscopic behaviour of Gd oxide with a Néel temperature, T N , close to 18 K (Gd oxide is antiferromagnetic below T N , paramagnetic above). Then size-induced effects can be encountered only for particles smaller than 60 nm. We find that the finite-size scaling model used for describing the size evolution of the antiferro/paramagnetic transition is valid for sizes comprised between 3.5 and 35 nm with parameters in excellent agreement with those usually found for antiferromagnetic materials. The correlation length (3.6 nm) is of the order of magnitude of a few lattice parameters and the critical exponent λ is found equal to 1.3, a value very close to that predicted by the three dimensional Heisenberg model ( λ =1.4).