Measuring elastic constants using non-contact ultrasonic techniques

The use of ultrasound for measuring elastic constants and phase transitions is well established. Standard measurements use piezoelectric transducers requiring couplant and contact with the sample. Recently, non-destructive testing (NDT) has seen an increase in the use of non-contact ultrasonic techniques, for example electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) and laser ultrasound, due to their many benefits. For measurements of single crystals over a range of temperatures non-contact techniques could also bring many benefits. These techniques do not require couplant, and hence do not suffer from breaking of the bond between transducer and sample during thermal cycling, and will potentially lead to a simpler and more adaptable measurement system with lower risk of sample damage. We present recent work adapting EMAT advances from NDT to measurements of single crystals at cryogenic temperatures and illustrate this with measurements of magnetic phase transitions in Gd64Sc36 using both contact and non-contact transducers. We discuss the measurement techniques implemented to overcome noise problems, and a digital pulse-echo-overlap technique, using data analysis in the frequency domain to measure the velocity