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Abstract Single crystal spinel CoFe 2 O 4 exhibits the largest room‐temperature saturation magnetostriction among non‐rare‐earth compounds and a high Curie temperature ( K), properties that are critical to a wide range of industrial and medical applications. Neutron spectroscopy reveals a large band splitting (∼60 meV) between two ferrimagnetic magnon branches, which is driven by site mixing between Co 2+ and Fe 3+ cations, and a significantly weaker magnetocrystalline anisotropy (∼3 meV). Central to this behavior is the competition between vast mismatched molecular fields on the tetrahedral A ‐site and octahedral B ‐site sublattices and the single‐ion anisotropy on the B ‐site. This creates a strong, energetic anisotropy that locks the magnetic moment within each structural domain in place. As a result of these differing energy scales, switching structural domains is energetically favored over a global spin reorientation under applied magnetic fields, and this is what amplifies the magnetostrictive nature of CoFe 2 O 4 .
Lane et al. (Wed,) studied this question.