No Arabic abstract
The discovery that the interface between two band gap insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 is highly conducting has raised an enormous interest in the field of oxide electronics. The LAlO3/SrTiO3 interface can be tuned using an electric field and switched from a superconducting to an insulating state. Conducting paths in an insulating background can be written applying a voltage with the tip of an atomic force microscope, creating great promise for the development of a new generation of nanoscale electronic devices. However, the mechanism for interface conductivity in LaAlO3/SrTiO3 has remained elusive. The theoretical explanation based on an intrinsic charge transfer (electronic reconstruction) has been strongly challenged by alternative descriptions based on point defects. In this work, thanks to modern aberration-corrected electron probes with atomic-scale spatial resolution, interfacial charge and atomic displacements originating the electric field within the system can be simultaneously measured, yielding unprecedented experimental evidence in favor of an intrinsic electronic reconstruction.
We study theoretically the magnetic and electric properties of the interface between two antiferromagnetic and insulating manganites: La0.5Ca0.5MnO3, a strong correlated insulator, and CaMnO3, a band-insulator. We find that a ferromagnetic and metallic electron gas is formed at the interface between the two layers. We confirm the metallic character of the interface by calculating the in-plane conductance. The possibility of increasing the electron gas density by selective doping is also discussed.
Ferromagnetism and superconductivity are in most cases adverse. However, recent experiments reveal that they coexist at interfaces of LaAlO3 and SrTiO3. We analyze the magnetic state within density functional theory and provide evidence that magnetism is not an intrinsic property of the two-dimensional electron liquid at the interface. We demonstrate that the robust ferromagnetic state is induced by the oxygen vacancies in SrTiO3- or in the LaAlO3-layer. This allows for the notion that areas with increased density of oxygen vacancies produce ferromagnetic puddles and account for the previous observation of a superparamagnetic behavior in the superconducting state.
The voltage-spectral density SV(f) of the 2-dimensional electron gas formed at the interface of LaAlO3 /SrTiO3 has been thoroughly investigated. The low-frequency component has a clear 1/f behavior with a quadratic bias current dependence, attributed to resistance fluctuations. However, its temperature dependence is inconsistent with the classical Hooge model, based on carrier-mobility fluctuations. The experimental results are, instead, explained in terms of carrier-number fluctuations, due to an excitation-trapping mechanism of the 2-dimensional electron gas.
Conducting and magnetic properties of a material often change in some confined geometries. However, a situation where a non-magnetic semiconductor becomes both metallic and magnetic at the surface is quite rare, and to the best of our knowledge has never been observed in experiment. In this work, we employ first-principles electronic structure theory to predict that such a peculiar magnetic state emerges in a family of quaternary Heusler compounds. We investigate magnetic and electronic properties of CoCrTiP, FeMnTiP and CoMnVAl. For the latter material, we also analyse the magnetic exchange interactions and use them for parametrizing an effective spin Hamiltonian. According to our results, magnetism in this material should persist at temperatures at least as high as 155 K.
The LAO/STO interface hosts a two-dimensional electron system that is unusually sensitive to the application of an in-plane magnetic field. Low-temperature experiments have revealed a giant negative magnetoresistance (dropping by 70%), attributed to a magnetic-field induced transition between interacting phases of conduction electrons with Kondo-screened magnetic impurities. Here we report on experiments over a broad temperature range, showing the persistence of the magnetoresistance up to the 20~K range --- indicative of a single-particle mechanism. Motivated by a striking correspondence between the temperature and carrier density dependence of our magnetoresistance measurements we propose an alternative explanation. Working in the framework of semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory we demonstrate that the combination of spin-orbit coupling and scattering from finite-range impurities can explain the observed magnitude of the negative magnetoresistance, as well as the temperature and electron density dependence.