Abstract
A defining feature of emergent phenomena in complex oxides is the competition and cooperation between ground states. In manganites, the balance between metallic and insulating phases can be tuned by the lattice; extending the range of lattice control would enhance the ability to access other phases. We stabilized uniform extreme tensile strain in nanoscale La0.7Ca0.3MnO3 membranes, exceeding 8% uniaxially and 5% biaxially. Uniaxial and biaxial strain suppresses the ferromagnetic metal at distinctly different strain values, inducing an insulator that can be extinguished by a magnetic field. Electronic structure calculations indicate that the insulator consists of charge-ordered Mn4+ and Mn3+ with staggered strain-enhanced Jahn-Teller distortions within the plane. This highly tunable strained membrane approach provides a broad opportunity to design and manipulate correlated electron states.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | aax9753 |
| Journal | Science |
| Volume | 368 |
| Issue number | 6486 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 3 2020 |
Funding
We thank A. P. Mackenzie, A. Millis, and A. Pasupathy for helpful discussions. Funding: Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (DOE-BES), Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515 (synthesis and measurements) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative through grant GBMF4415 (development of strain platform). Also supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Hybrid Materials MURI under award FA9550-18-1-0480 (V.H.); DOE grant DE-SC0012375 (M.G.); Army Research Office (ARO) grant W911NF-15-1-0017 (J.M.R.); and the German Science Foundation (DFG) within CRC TRR80 (project G03 and G08) (M.V. and R.P.). Calculations were performed using the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by NSF grant ACI-1548562 and the CARBON Cluster at Argonne National Laboratory (DOE-BES, contract DE-AC02-06CH11357), and the MagnitUDE supercomputer at the University of Duisburg-Essen (DFG grants INST 20876/209-1 FUGG, INST20876/243-1 FUGG). Part of this work was performed at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities (SNSF), supported by NSF award ECCS-1542152.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General