posted on 2022-08-19, 15:40authored byYongda Chen, Xiao Yuan, Siqi Shan, Chong Zhang, Ruxin Liu, Xu Zhang, Wenzhuo Zhuang, Yequan Chen, Yongbing Xu, Rong Zhang, Xuefeng Wang
Great efforts have been devoted to exploring the emergent
phenomena
occurring in heterostructures of correlated oxides. However, the presence
of both magnetic and electrical dead layers in functional oxide films
generally obstructs the device functionalization and miniaturization.
Here, we demonstrate an effective strategy to significantly reduce
the thickness of dead layers in a prototypical correlated oxide system,
La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 (LSMO) grown on LaAlO3 (LAO) substrates, via strain engineering by inserting a Sr3Al2O6 buffer layer with a different
thickness at heterointerfaces. In this way, the thicknesses of the
magnetic and electrical dead layers of LSMO films on the LAO substrates
notably decrease from 8 to 4 unit cells and from 13 to 9 unit cells,
respectively. Our results provide a convenient method to minimize
or even eliminate the dead layers of correlated oxides through the
interfacial strain engineering, which has potential applications in
nanoscale oxide spintronic devices.