Structure of Fe3O4in the Low Temperature Phase as Deduced from Advanced Analysis of the NMR Study

Experimental results by NMR are most powerful to determine the microscopic electron ordering structure of magnetite. In a previous paper, we determined the fundamental electron ordering structures by arranging the Fe 3+ ions which were characterized by the assortment of the nearest neighbour cations. In this paper, we divide the fundamental electron ordering structures into unit patterns, which correspond to the resonance lines, and construct a new structure by mixing and jointing again these unit patterns. The new model is a twinning structure, x-y twin, of two kinds of the “normal” electron ordering patterns. The structure is fundamentally bundle structure and is possibly a layer structure which is formed by layered twin boundaries. This model gives good agreement with the NMR results even in the intensity ratio of the resonance lines and with the extinction rule of the diffraction spots. The newly proposed structure is a key to the solution of many strange behavior of magnetite at low temperature.