A. Migliori
Los Alamos Natl. Lab., P.O. Box 1663, MSK764, Los Alamos, NM 87545
Electronics, transducer design, and computational procedures are described for the application of resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) to single crystal systems. The particular implementation of RUS described here can be used on samples without x-ray orientation of crystallographic axes and, because of the unique point-contact transducer design, works well from cryogenic temperatures to about 400 K. The power of the technique is illustrated with examples of studies on doped and stoichiometric single crystals and it is shown how the doped samples exhibit certain fundamental symmetry breaking effects only observable with RUS. [This work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy.]