Rare-earth nickelatesRNiO₃: thin films and heterostructures

Abstract

This review stands in the larger framework of functional materials by focussing on heterostructures of rare-earth nickelates, described by the chemical formula RNiO where R is a trivalent rare-earth R = La, Pr, Nd, Sm, …, Lu. Nickelates are characterized by a rich phase diagram of structural and physical properties and serve as a benchmark for the physics of phase transitions in correlated oxides where electron-lattice coupling plays a key role. Much of the recent interest in nickelates concerns heterostructures, that is single layers of thin film, multilayers or superlattices, with the general objective of modulating their physical properties through strain control, confinement or interface effects. We will discuss the extensive studies on nickelate heterostructures as well as outline different approaches to tuning and controlling their physical properties and, finally, review application concepts for future devices.

Beyond Coherent Oxide Heterostructures: Atomic‐Scale Structure of Misfit Dislocations

“…Several insightful review articles have already been published on oxide heterostructures, with the majority of them centering on experimental synthesis and characterization, and comprehending the origin of emergent properties in these heterostructures. [1][2][3]8,18] Nevertheless, none of these review articles exclusively focus on the atomic-scale structure of semicoherent oxide heterostructures or discuss the various aspects of misfit accommodation via formation of misfit dislocations at these heterointerfaces. An exception to this is a recent review by Sandiumenge, which provides an experimental viewpoint of the complex interplay between the various mechanisms contributing to the misfit accommodation at mismatched perovskite oxide heterointerfaces.…”

“…In the literature, there are extremely insightful articles that offer an overview of the coherent oxide heterostructures from experimental and computational perspectives. [1][2][3]8,15,18,20,31,[47][48][49] Predominantly, there are several DFT-based computational studies in the literature that address what are presumably semi-coherent oxide interfaces in reality, but constrain them to be coherent. [32,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56] Forcing the two oxides to be coherent allows the implementation of smaller supercells to mimic the oxide heterostructures, which are tractable by DFT calculations.…”

Epitaxial stabilization of ultra thin films of high entropy perovskite

“…The quest to understand the origin of these transitions have led to remarkable progress in epitaxial stabilization of RENiO 3 family (see Refs. 25 and 26, and literature cited therein), and thin films of RENiO 3 with RE=La, Pr, Nd, Sm, and Eu have been stabilized so far [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] . This further provides a unique opportunity to verify the role of disorder vs. t avg , in determining the electronic and magnetic properties of perovskite HEO with a strong disorder at the A site.In this letter, we report successful layer-by-layer epitaxial growth of (La 0.2 Pr 0.2 Nd 0.2 Sm 0.2 Eu 0.2 )NiO 3 [(LPNSE)NO] thin films on a single crystalline NdGaO 3 (NGO) substrate by pulsed laser deposition (PLD).…”

Scale-invariant magnetic textures in the strongly correlated oxide NdNiO3

“…In this family of compounds, the dominant structural/electronic instability sets the stage for a first-order transition (P2 1 /n to Pbnm) to a bond-disproportionated phase, that is accompanied by a concurrent insulator-to-metal transition (IMT). The low-temperature electronic phase then undergoes a second transition to an antiferromagnetic (AFM) ground state [22][23][24]. The nature of the AFM transition ostensibly changes from second-order for * Present address: CIC Nanogune, Tolosa Hiribidea 76, 20008 Donostia, Spain † rcomin@mit.edu smaller cations (Sm, Eu, Y) to first-order for larger ones (Nd and Pr) [22,23].…”