ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

This is a page describing data taken during an experiment at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. Information about the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source can be found at https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk.


Phonon confinement gap in Ln-based nanocrystals

Abstract: The phonon density of states (PDOS), which plays an important role in the mechanisms that determine the unique physical properties of nanocrystals (NCs), strongly depends on the reduced size of the NC. While these confinement effects are often invoked to explain surprising results, the direct study of lattice dynamics in NCs is difficult. Theoretically, it is shown that as the NC size decreases, the gapless and continuous PDOS observed in the bulk becomes discrete and is characterized by a cutoff in the low-frequency part of the spectrum ? the so called phonon confinement gap. Here we propose to measure the PDOS of both nanocrystalline and bulklike microcrystalline samples of photon-upconverting NaYb0.98Er0.02F4 with high resolution cold TOF neutron spectrometer LET. The data obtained will allow us to investigate the size effects on PDOS and extract the phonon confinement energy gap.

Principal Investigator: Dr Frank Weber
Experimenter: Dr Yuliia Tymoshenko
Local Contact: Dr David Voneshen

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2220287

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2220287

Part DOI Instrument Public release date Download Link
10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2220287-1 LET 17 November 2025 Download

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
Select the data format above to find out more about it.

Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Dr Frank Weber et al; (2022): Phonon confinement gap in Ln-based nanocrystals, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2220287

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.



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