Magnetic correlations in a classic Mott system

The metal-insulator transition in pure and doped V2O3 causes a fundamental change in its magnetism. While the antiferromagnetic insulator (AFI) is a Heisenberg localized spin system, the antiferromagnetism in the strongly correlated metal is determined by a Fermi surface instability. Paramagnetic fluctuations in the metal and insulator represent similar spatial spin correlations, but are unrelated to the long-range order in the AFI. The phase transition to the AFI induces an abrupt switching of magnetic correlations to a different magnetic wave vector. The AFI transition, therefore, is not a conventional spin order-disorder transition. Instead it is accounted for by an ordering in the occupation of the two degenerate d-orbitals at the Fermi level. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.