Pressure dependence of the Verwey transition in magnetite: An infrared spectroscopic point of view

We investigated the electronic and vibrational properties of magnetite at temperatures from 300 K down to 10K and for pressures up to 10 GPa by far-infrared reflectivity measurements. The Verwey transition is manifested by a drastic decrease of the overall reflectance and the splitting of the phonon modes as well as the activation of additional phonon modes. In the whole studied pressure range, the down-shift of the overall reflectance spectrum saturates and the maximum number of phonon modes is reached at a critical temperature, which sets a lower bound for the Verwey transition temperature T-v. Based on these optical results, a pressure-temperature phase diagram for magnetite is proposed. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4758303]