Hysteresis dynamics of rare earth nickelates: unusual scaling exponent and asymmetric spinodal decomposition

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of phase-transitions, interpretations of their experimental observations and their agreement with theoretical predictions continue to be a long-standing research interest. Here, we present detailed phase-transition dynamics of rare earth nickelates associated with its first-order metal–insulator transition. The thermal hysteresis shows absence of training effect and defies the Preisach model. A large phase-coexistence in insulating state during cooling suggests kinetically arrested glassy dynamics of the phase-transition. Experimentally derived hysteresis scaling exponent is much larger than the mean-field predicted universal value of 2/3. In the phase-coexistence region, the quench and hold measurement depicts higher stability of the metallic state compare to that of the insulating one; highlighting the manifestation of phase-coexistence via asymmetric spinodal decomposition. All these observations for nickelates are in stark contrast to the phase-transition dynamics of canonically similar vanadates but are closer to those of glasses, alloys. A substantial disagreement between the experiment and theory emphasizes the necessity to incorporate system-dependent details for the accurate interpretation of the experimental results.