Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, using the Spallation Neutron Source's ARCS Wide Angular Range Chopper Spectrometer, performed spin-wave studies of magnetically ordered iron chalcogenides. They based their conclusions on comparisons with previous spin-wave data on magnetically ordered pnictides, another class of iron-based superconductors.

"As we analyze the spectra, we find that even though the nearest neighbor exchange couplings between chalcogenide and pnictide atoms are different, the next nearest neighbor exchange couplings are closely similar," said Pengcheng Dai, who has a joint appointment with ORNL's Neutron Sciences Directorate and the University of Tennessee. Read more here.