A laser-ARPES study of LaNiO3 thin films grown by sputter deposition

Abstract

Thin films of the correlated transition-metal oxide LaNiO${}_3$ undergo a metal-insulator transition when their thickness is reduced to a few unit cells. Here, we use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to study the evolution of the electronic structure across this transition in a series of epitaxial LaNiO${}_3$ films of thicknesses ranging from 19 to 2 u.c. grown in situ by RF magnetron sputtering. Our data show a strong reduction of the electronic mean free path as the thickness is reduced below 5 u.c. This prevents the system from becoming electronically two-dimensional, as confirmed by the largely unchanged Fermi surface seen in our experiments. In the insulating state we observe a strong suppression of the coherent quasiparticle peak but no clear gap. These features resemble previous observations of the insulating state of NdNiO${}_3$.

arXiv commentSubmitted to APL Materials

References in corpus (16)

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• Tunable disorder and localization in the rare-earth nickelates
• Electronic structure of buried LaNiO3 layers in (111)-oriented LaNiO3/LaMnO3 superlattices probed by soft x-ray ARPES

Cited by in corpus (4)

• RENiO3 single crystals (RE = Nd, Sm, Gd, Dy, Y, Ho, Er, Lu) grown from molten salts under 2000 bar oxygen-gas pressure
• Epitaxial growth of Ruddlesden-Popper neodymium nickelates Nd${}_{n+1}$Ni${}_n$O${}_{3n+1}$ ($n$ = 1-5)
• A Laser-ARPES View of the 2D Electron Systems at LaAlO3/SrTiO3 and Al/SrTiO3 Interfaces
• Layer controlled orbital selective Mott transition in monolayer nickelate