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Abstract
Transition metal oxides host an array of exotic electronic phases, including superconductivity, ferroelectricity, quantum spin liquid and Mott insulators. Their extreme sensitivity to external stimuli enables various routes to manipulate the ground state, which greatly improves our understanding of the physics involved. Here, we report the competition between strain and dimensionality effects on the phase evolution in high quality NdNiO3 films down to several unit cells. While both compressive and tensile strains increase the Ni 3d band width and favor the metallic phase, reducing dimensionality, on the other hand, decreases the covalent band width and favors the insulating phase in NdNiO3. The experimental observations are well supported by ab initio calculations and improve our understanding of the electronic behavior in strongly correlated electron systems.
Highlights
Transition metal oxides host an array of exotic electronic phases, including superconductivity, ferroelectricity, quantum spin liquid and Mott insulators
Transition metal oxides are fascinating materials in which the interplay between charge, spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom leads to many exotic phenomena[1,2]
We have studied a set of NdNiO3 (NNO) films with different thicknesses in an attempt to figure out how strain and dimensionality together affect the electronic phase evolution
Summary
Films with thicknesses below 30 u.c. are found to be coherently strained on both substrates (Fig. 1b), consistent with previous work[26]. When the film thickness is below 20 u.c., the diffraction peak broadens (Supplementary Fig. S1), leading to increased error bar in the calculated out-of-plane lattice constant. Note that despite the similar thickness dependence, room temperature resistivity and TMI of NNO films on LAO are lower than that on STO for the same thickness (Fig. 2b,e), which is consistent with previous reports[13,26,27]
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