Quasiparticles in Calcium Doped Yttrium-Iron Garnets

In yttrium-iron garnets an electrical charge is carried by quasiparticles based on compensating holes which move either at oxygen or iron ions of the tetragonal sublattice. The quasiparticles can also get localized because of their coupling to optical phonons on the iron sites. A multi-band model of holes coupled to phonons is applied to find additional energy levels in the gap between the lower of the narrow 3d bands and the wide 2p band, whose occurrence plays a crucial role in a conductivity mechanism. The density of states is considerably modified by the interaction between the holes and local distortion of the lattice.