Advances in synthesis techniques and materials understanding have given rise to oxide heterostructures with intriguing physical phenomena that cannot be found in their constituents. In these structures, precise control of interface quality, including
oxygen stoichiometry, is critical for unambiguous tailoring of the interfacial properties, with deposition of the first monolayer being the most important step in shaping a well-defined functional interface. Here, we studied interface formation and strain evolution during the initial growth of LaAlO3 on SrTiO3 by pulsed laser deposition, in search of a means for controlling the atomic-sharpness of the interfaces. Our experimental results show that growth of LaAlO3 at a high oxygen pressure dramatically enhances interface abruptness. As a consequence, the critical thickness for strain relaxation was increased, facilitating coherent epitaxy of perovskite oxides. This provides a clear understanding of the role of oxygen pressure during the interface formation, and enables the synthesis of oxide heterostructures with chemically-sharper interfaces.
We report on growth and ferroelectric (FE) properties of superlattices (SLs) composed of the FE BaTiO3 and the paraelectric (PE) CaTiO3. Previous theories have predicted that the polarization in (BaTiO3)n/(CaTiO3)n SLs increases as the sublayer thick
ness (n) increases when the same strain state is maintained. However, our BaTiO3/CaTiO3 SLs show a varying lattice-strain state and systematic reduction in polarization with increasing n while coherently-strained SLs with n=1, 2 show a FE polarization of ca. 8.5 uC/cm^2. We suggest that the strain coupling plays more important role in FE properties than the electrostatic interlayer coupling based on constant dielectric permittivities.
We investigated the effects of temperature and magnetic field on the electronic structure of hexagonal RMnO3 (R = Gd, Tb, Dy, and Ho) thin films using optical spectroscopy. As the magnetic ordering of the system was disturbed, a systematic change in
the electronic structure was commonly identified in this series. The optical absorption peak near 1.7 eV showed an unexpectedly large shift of more than 150 meV from 300 K to 15 K, accompanied by an anomaly of the shift at the Neel temperature. The magnetic field dependent measurement clearly revealed a sizable shift of the corresponding peak when a high magnetic field was applied. Our findings indicated strong coupling between the magnetic ordering and the electronic structure in the multiferroic hexagonal RMnO3 compounds.
We report on the growth and properties of high quality bicolor oxide superlattices, composed of two perovskites out of BaTiO3, CaTiO3, and SrTiO3. The artificially grown superlattices are structurally unique and have a macroscopically homogeneous pha
se, which is not feasible to recreate in bulk form. By artificial structuring, it is found that the polarization of such superlattices can be highly increased as compared to pseudo-binary ceramics with the same overall composition. Such strong enhancement in superlattice is attributed to newly-developed ionic motions of A-site cations at the hetero-interfaces due to the interfacial coupling of electrostatic and elastic interactions, which cannot be found in single phase materials.
