Pure electronic metal-insulator transition at the interface of complex oxides.
In complex materials observed electronic phases and transitions between them often involve coupling between many degrees of freedom whose entanglement convolutes understanding of the instigating mechanism. Metal-insulator transitions are one such problem where coupling to the structural, orbital, charge, and magnetic order parameters frequently obscures the underlying physics. Here, we demonstrate a way to unravel this conundrum by heterostructuring a prototypical multi-ordered complex oxide NdNiO3 in ultra thin geometry, which preserves the metal-to-insulator transition and bulk-like magnetic order parameter, but entirely suppresses the symmetry lowering and long-range charge order parameter. These findings illustrate the utility of heterointerfaces as a powerful method for removing competing order parameters to gain greater insight into the nature of the transition, here revealing that the magnetic order generates the transition independently, leading to an exceptionally rare purely electronic metal-insulator transition with no symmetry change.
Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
D
D
Meyers
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
Jian
J
Liu
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.
J W
JW
Freeland
Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
S
S
Middey
Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
M
M
Kareev
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Jihwan
J
Kwon
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
J M
JM
Zuo
Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Yi-De
YD
Chuang
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.
J W
JW
Kim
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.
P J
PJ
Ryan
Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA.
J
J
Chakhalian