Magnetic pyrochlore oxides

Within the past 20years or so, there has occurred an explosion of interest in the magnetic behavior of pyrochlore oxides of the type A23+B24+O7, where A is a rare-earth ion and B is usually a transition metal. Both the A and B sites form a network of corner-sharing tetrahedra which is the quintessential framework for a geometrically frustrated magnet. In these systems the natural tendency to form long-range ordered ground states in accord with …