Tailoring Materials for Mottronics: Excess Oxygen Doping of a Prototypical Mott Insulator

Abstract

The Mott transistor is a paradigm for a new class of electronic devices---often referred to by the term Mottronics---, which are based on charge correlations between the electrons. Since correlation-induced insulating phases of most oxide compounds are usually very robust, new methods have to be developed to push such materials right to the boundary to the metallic phase in order to enable the metal-insulator transition to be switched by electric gating. Here we demonstrate that thin films of the prototypical Mott insulator LaTiO${}_3$ grown by pulsed laser deposition under oxygen atmosphere are readily tuned by excess oxygen doping across the line of the band-filling controlled Mott transition in the electronic phase diagram. The detected insulator to metal transition is characterized by a strong change in resistivity of several orders of magnitude. The use of suitable substrates and capping layers to inhibit oxygen diffusion facilitates full control of the oxygen content and renders the films stable against exposure to ambient conditions, making LaTiO${}_{3+x}$ a promising functional material for Mottronics devices.

References in corpus (11)

• Mott transition and suppression of orbital fluctuations in orthorhombic 3$d^1$ perovskites
• Profiling the interface electron gas of LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures by hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy
• Engineered Mott ground state in LaTiO${}_{3+\delta }$/LaNiO${}_3$ heterostructure
• Electronics with correlated oxides: SrVO${}_3$/SrTiO${}_3$ as a Mott transistor
• Photoemission from buried interfaces in SrTiO3/LaTiO3 superlattices
• Field-driven Mott gap collapse and resistive switch in correlated insulators
• Determination of the orbital moment and crystal field splitting in LaTiO${}_3$
• A heterojunction modulation-doped Mott transistor
• Origin of the orbital and spin orderings in rare-earth titanates
• Quasiparticle interference on cubic perovskite oxide surfaces
• Structural, magnetic, and electronic properties of GdTiO3 Mott insulator thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Probing Emergent Surface and Interfacial Properties in Complex Oxides via in situ X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy
• Full control of Co valence in isopolar LaCoO3 / LaTiO3 perovskite heterostructures via interfacial engineering
• Deterministic influence of substrate-induced oxygen vacancy diffusion on $B{i}_{2}W{O}_6$ thin film growth
• Probing the phase transition to a coherent 2D Kondo lattice
• Controlling the electrical and magnetic ground states by doping in the complete phase diagram of titanate Eu1-xLaxTiO3 thin films
• Toward Functionalized Ultrathin Oxide Films: the Impact of Surface Apical Oxygen
• Real-space dynamical mean-field theory of Friedel oscillations in strongly correlated electron systems
• Inhomogeneous superconductivity and quasilinear magnetoresistance at amorphous LaTiO3/SrTiO3 interfaces
• Hard X-ray photoemission spectroscopy of LaVO${}_3$/SrTiO${}_3$: Band alignment and electronic reconstruction
• Linear colossal magnetoresistance driven by magnetic textures in LaTiO3 thin films on SrTiO3
• Metallic interfaces in a CaTiO${}_3$/LaTiO${}_3$ heterostructure
• Lattice contraction induced by resistive switching in chromium-doped V2O3: a hallmark of Mott physics
• Orthorhombic distortion drives orbital ordering in an antiferromagnetic 3$d^1$ Mott insulator
• Ultrafast metal-to-insulator switching in a strongly correlated system