Proposed Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in nanostructured films of Gd at low temperature and its manifestations in electrical resistivity and magnetoresistance.

In this paper we report the observation of a proposed Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of magnons in a temperature range of around 15-20 K in nanostructured films of Gd with grain sizes that are much larger than the size range where superparamagentism is expected. The observation was carried out using magnetic as well as high precision resistivity and magnetoresistance (MR) measurements performed to low temperatures. We observe that the experimental observations depend crucially on one parameter, namely softening of the spin wave stiffness parameter D at BEC and the resistivity as well as MR can be related quantitatively to magnetic measurements through the temperature variation of the constant D in the vicinity of the transition. This paper establishes that the BEC reported before in nanocrystalline Gd can be extended to a somewhat larger size range.