Ferrites without iron as potential quantum materials

Abstract

Ferrites crystallize in a variety of different structure types, which, although their formulas may at first appear to be too complex to understand intuitively, are in fact built from the stacking of only a handful of simple building blocks. Ferrites without iron, in contrast to the well-known iron-based ferrites, remain understudied, although many family members with distinctive structural and physical properties are known. This review briefly introduces the solid-state chemistry of ferrite compounds, primarily describing their crystal structures, followed by a summary of the reported structure-property relations of the iron-free members of this large family of materials. We also consider beta aluminas to be members of the iron-free ferrite structure family and describe them here.