Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 79: Transport: Spintronics, Spincalorics and Magnetotransport (jointly with DS, HL, MA)
TT 79.2: Talk
Friday, March 24, 2017, 09:45–10:00, HSZ 03
Fe3O4 thin films: controlling and manipulating an elusive quantum material — •xionghua liu, chun-fu chang, aurora diana rata, alexander christoph komarek, and liu hao tjeng — Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Nöthnitzerstr. 40, 01187 Dresden, Germany
Fe3O4 (magnetite) is one of the most elusive quantum materials and at the same time one of the most studied transition metal oxide materials for thin film applications. The theoretically expected half-metallic behavior generates high expectations that it can be used in spintronic devices. Yet, despite the tremendous amount of work devoted to preparing thin films, the enigmatic first order metal-insulator transition and the hall mark of magnetite known as the Verwey transition, is in thin films extremely broad and occurs at substantially lower temperatures as compared to that in high quality bulk single crystals.
In this work, we investigate systematically the effect of oxygen stoichiometry, thickness, strain, and microstructure on the Verwey transition in epitaxial Fe3O4 thin films on a variety of substrates. We have been able to determine the factors that affect negatively the Verwey transition in thin films. We have succeeded in finding and making a particular class of substrates that allows the growth of magnetite thin films with the Verwey transition as sharp as in the bulk. Moreover, we are now able to tune the transition temperature and, using tensile strain, increase it to substantially higher values than in the bulk.