Selective Interface Control of Order Parameters in Complex Oxides

Abstract

In complex materials observed electronic phases and transitions between them often involves coupling between many degrees of freedom whose entanglement convolutes understanding of the instigating mechanism. Metal-insulator transitions are one such problem where coupling to the structural, orbital, charge, and magnetic order parameters frequently obscures the underlying physics. Here, we demonstrate a way to unravel this conundrum by heterostructuring a prototypical multi-ordered complex oxide NdNiO3 in ultra thin geometry, which preserves the metal-to-insulator transition and bulk-like magnetic order parameter, but entirely suppresses the symmetry lowering and charge order parameter. These findings illustrate the utility of heterointerfaces as a powerful method for removing competing order parameters to gain greater insight into the nature of the transition, here revealing that the magnetic order generates the transition independently, leading to a purely electronic Mott metal-insulator transition.

16 pages, 4 Figures

References in corpus (8)

• Mott transition in VO2 revealed by infrared spectroscopy and nano-imaging
• Emergent properties hidden in plane view: Strong electronic correlations at oxide interfaces
• Resonant Elastic Soft X-Ray Scattering
• Role of magnetic and orbital ordering at the metal-insulator transition in NdNiO3
• Magnetically driven metal-insulator transition in NaOsO3
• Tunable Charge and Spin Order in PrNiO${}_3$ Thin Films and Superlattices
• Engineered Mott ground state in LaTiO${}_{3+\delta }$/LaNiO${}_3$ heterostructure
• Quantitative determination of bond order and lattice distortions in nickel oxide heterostructures by resonant x-ray scattering

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Epitaxial stabilization of ultra thin films of high entropy perovskite
• Disentangling lattice and electronic contributions to the metal-insulator transition from bulk vs. layer confined RNiO${}_3$
• Ramp Reversal Memory and Phase-Boundary Scarring in Transition Metal Oxides
• Key role of lattice symmetry in the metal-insulator transition of NdNiO3 films
• Distortion mode anomalies in bulk PrNiO${}_3$ illustrating the potential of symmetry-adapted distortion mode analysis for the study of phase transitions
• Disentangled cooperative orderings in artificial rare-earth nickelates
• Anomalous electron transport in epitaxial NdNiO${}_3$ films
• Epitaxial strain modulated electronic properties of interface controlled nickelate superlattice
• Control of hidden ground-state order in NdNiO${}_3$ superlattices
• Electric field driven octahedral rotation in perovskite
• Electron Correlation driven Metal-Insulator transition in Strained and Disordered VO2 films
• Emergent electronic landscapes in a novel valence-ordered nickelate with tri-component nickel coordination
• Energy Landscape analysis of metal-insulator transitions: theory and application to Ca${}_2$RuO${}_4$, $R$NiO${}_3$ and their heterostructures
• Probing electronic and magnetic transitions of short periodic nickelate superlattices using synchrotron x-ray