Geometrical lattice engineering of complex oxide heterostructures: a designer approach to emergent quantum states
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Functional Oxides Prospective Article
Geometrical lattice engineering of complex oxide heterostructures: a designer approach to emergent quantum states Xiaoran Liu, S. Middey, Yanwei Cao, and M. Kareev, Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA J. Chakhalian, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA Address all correspondence to J. Chakhalian at [email protected] (Received 17 May 2016; accepted 20 July 2016)
Abstract Epitaxial heterostructures composed of complex oxides have fascinated researchers for over a decade as they offer multiple degrees of freedom to unveil emergent many-body phenomena often unattainable in bulk. Recently, apart from stabilizing such artificial structures along the conventional [001]-direction, tuning the growth direction along unconventional crystallographic axes has been highlighted as a promising route to realize novel quantum many-body phases. Here we illustrate this rapidly developing field of geometrical lattice engineering with the emphasis on a few prototypical examples of the recent experimental efforts to design complex oxide heterostructures along the (111) orientation for quantum phase discovery and potential applications.
Introduction The search and exploration of new collective quantum states are of prime importance and interest in the condensed matter physics. Toward this goal, ultra-thin heterostructures composed of two or more structurally, chemically, and electronically dissimilar constituent oxides have been developed into a powerful approach over the past decade.[1–6] The main notion here is that at the interface where the dissimilarities meet, the frustration caused by mismatches between arrangement of atoms, charges, orbitals, or spins can trigger the emergence of phenomena with electronic and magnetic structures markedly different from the corresponding bulk compositions.[1] As a result, the interface engineering (IE) has opened a route to novel material behaviors by means of those mismatches as the control parameters. The IE approach is intimately connected to another popular approach to tailor the properties of materials with epitaxial strain by effectively altering the bond-length and bond-angle of structural units through the deliberate choice of substrates. The exploration of epitaxial strain due to the lattice mismatch has been thus far successfully used to manipulate the electronic bandwidth, band filling, ferroelectric, and magnetic interactions of the ultra-thin films.[7–9] Inspired by the success of those engineering methods, very recently another promising venue collectively known as geometrical lattice engineering (GLE) has been presented as a powerful tool to forge new topological and quantum manybody states.[10–12] In close synergy with the IE and strain engineering (SE) where mismatches between layers can induce unusual interactions, the key idea behind the GLE is to design fully epitaxial ultra-thin heterostructures with an artificial
lattice geometry generated by s
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