Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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DF: Fachverband Dielektrische Festkörper

DF 8: Ferroics - Domains, Domain Walls and Skyrmions I

DF 8.10: Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 12:30–12:45, WIL B321

Conductive domain walls in SrMnO₃ thin films under epitaxial tensile strain — •Lokamani Lokamani¹, Carina Faber³, Peter Zahn¹, Nicola Spaldin³, and Sibylle Gemming^1,2 — ¹Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, HZDR, 01314 Dresden, Germany — ²Institute of Physics, Technische Universität, 09107 Chemnitz, Germany — ³Materials Theory, ETH, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland

Strontium manganate (SrMnO₃), a perovskite polymorph, exhibits cubic structure at low temperatures, which transforms into a hexagonal one at high temperatures. Density-functional calculations showed earlier, that under tensile strain the ground state of bulk SrMnO₃ corresponds to a G-type-antiferromagnetic (G-AFM) cubic structure. If deposited as epitaxially strained thin film a rearrangement of the MnO₆ coordination polyhedra was calculated, which is antiferrodistortive in the plane parallel to the substrate[1]. Recently, ferroelectric domains have been observed experimentally in 20nm thin films of SrMnO₃ under 1.7% tensile strain on (001)-oriented LSAT[2]. Strikingly, the domain walls were found to be electrically insulating, rendering the domains to form stable nano-capacitors.

Here, we present a first-principle investigation of the domain wall formation in epitaxially strained SrMnO₃ and a discussion of the electronic properties.