Magnetic and Magnetocaloric Properties of YbVO3 Single Crystals: Experiments and DFT Calculations

In this paper, we mainly focus on the magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of YbVO₃ single crystals grown by the floating-zone method. The crystals present several phase transitions close to 104, 65, and 20 K involving mainly the vanadium sublattice. Particularly, the complex electronic and magnetic structures of YbVO₃ result in interesting thermal effects over a wide range of temperatures including a large inverse magnetocaloric effect close to 60 K. In fact, the maximum entropy change is found to be almost 12 J/kg K for a magnetic field change of 0 to 7 T at 64.25 K applied along the c axis and at 65.5 K along the ab plane. More interestingly, the strong magnetocrystalline anisotropy shown by the V³⁺ sublattice results in a large rotating magnetocaloric effect (RMCE) at relatively high temperatures (60 K). This means that the refrigeration process can be achieved simply by spinning YbVO₃ single crystals in constant magnetic fields within the ac or bc planes instead of varying the external magnetic field. Our experimental findings are discussed and analyzed in the framework of Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations.