Abstract
Thickness is a very important parameter with which to control the microstructures, along with physical properties in transition-metal nitride thin films. In work presented here, CrN films with different thicknesses (from 26 to 130 nm) were grown by chemical solution deposition. The films are pure phase and polycrystalline. Thickness dependence of microstructures and electrical transport behavior were studied. With the increase of films thickness, grain size and nitrogen content are increased, while resistivity, zero-field sensitivity and magnetoresistance are decreased. In the temperature range of 5–350 K, all samples exhibited semiconductor-like properties with dρ/dT < 0. For the range above and below the Néel temperature, the resistivity can be fitted by the thermal activation model and the two-dimensional weak localization (2D-WL) model, respectively. The ultra-low magnetoresistance at a low temperature under high magnetic fields with a large zero-field sensitivity was observed in the CrN thin films. The zero-field sensitivity can be effectively tuned to 10−2 K−1 at 5 K with a magnetoresistance of less than 1% at 2 K under 14 T by reasonably controlling the thickness.
Highlights
As a typical of transition-metal nitride, chromium nitride (CrN) with an NaCl structure has been widely investigated in the past few years
CrN thin films with different thicknesses were fabricated by chemical solution deposition on SrTiO3 single crystal substrates
Increasing the thickness resulted in an increase in the grain size and nitrogen content
Summary
As a typical of transition-metal nitride, chromium nitride (CrN) with an NaCl structure has been widely investigated in the past few years. Compared with the magnetic transition from antiferromagnetism to paramagnetism reported extensively in the literature, the electrical transport behavior of CrN thin films exhibits large variations. The transport properties transform from a semiconductor-like behavior to a metallic behavior, coupled with the tremendous change of resistance value at 300 K. Some studies report that the room temperature resistivity of CrN thin films varies from 0.1 to 2 mΩ·cm, and the electrical transport behavior is characterized by metallic conductivity. Others report that the transport properties of CrN thin films are similar to those of the semiconductor, and the room temperature resistivity is 103 mΩ·cm [6,7,8]
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