Abstract
In the past decade, the rich physics exhibited by solid interfaces combining octahedral framework structures of transition metal oxides has fascinated the materials science community. However, the behavior of these materials still elude the current understanding of classical semiconductor and metal epitaxy. The reason for that is rooted in the surprising versatility of linked coordination units to adapt to a dissimilar substrate and the strong sensitivity of correlated oxides to external perturbations. The confluence of atomic control in oxide thin film epitaxy, state of the art high spatial resolution characterization techniques, and electronic structure computations, has allowed in recent years to obtain first insights on the underlying microscopic mechanisms governing the epitaxy of these fascinating materials. Here, we shortly review these mechanisms and highlight their potential in the design of novel nanostructures with enhanced functionalities.
Highlights
Interfaces bridging complex metal oxides have emerged in recent years as a new paradigm of epitaxy owing to their extraordinary potential to exhibit unanticipated and conceptually challenging states such as highly conducting electron gases between two insulating materials (Ohtomo and Hwang, 2004), interfacial superconductivity (Reyren et al, 2007; Gozar et al, 2008), or polarization-dependent spin transfer (Garcia et al, 2010). This fascinating behavior stems from the delicate balance existing among strongly coupled lattice, charge, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom, which in turn manifests a strong sensitivity to external perturbations (Hwang et al, 2012), such as the biaxial stress induced by a mismatched substrate, polar discontinuities, and even very subtle effects like slight dissimilarities in the orientation of the coordination units
These compounds commonly exhibit an ABO3 perovskite-type crystal structure characterized by a framework of corner sharing BO6 oxygen octahedra hosting the B cation that can be derived from a common undistorted cubic aristotype through the tilting of essentially rigid BO6 units (Glazer, 1972; Howard and Stokes, 1998)
Controlling the topology of the octahedral framework through misfit strain appears as an obvious strategy to control the stability of electronic and magnetic states
Summary
Interfaces bridging complex metal oxides have emerged in recent years as a new paradigm of epitaxy owing to their extraordinary potential to exhibit unanticipated and conceptually challenging states such as highly conducting electron gases between two insulating materials (Ohtomo and Hwang, 2004), interfacial superconductivity (Reyren et al, 2007; Gozar et al, 2008), or polarization-dependent spin transfer (Garcia et al, 2010).
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