Raman Investigations of Rare Earth Arsenate Single Crystals...

Polarized Raman Spectroscopy was used to investigate the room-temperature phonon characteristics of a series of rare-earth arsenate (REAsO4, RE = Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Tm, Yb, and Lu) single crystals. The Raman data were interpreted in a systematic manner based on the known tetragonal zircon structure of these compounds, and assignments and correlations were made for the observed bands. We found that the wavenumber of the internal modes of the AsO4 tetrahedron increased with increasing atomic number, and for three out of four lattice wavenumbers observed, this tendency was not nearly so marked as in the case of the internal mode wavenumber.