Chemical ordering suppresses large-scale electronic phase separation in doped manganites

Yinyan Zhu; Kai Du; Jiebin Niu; Lingfang Lin; Wengang Wei; Hao Liu; Hanxuan Lin; Kai Zhang; Tieying Yang; Yunfang Kou; Jian Shao; Xingyu Gao; Xiaoshan Xu; Xiaoshan Wu; Shuai Dong; Lifeng Yin; Jian Shen

doi:10.1038/ncomms11260

Chemical ordering suppresses large-scale electronic phase separation in doped manganites

Nat Commun. 2016 Apr 7:7:11260. doi: 10.1038/ncomms11260.

Authors

Yinyan Zhu¹, Kai Du¹, Jiebin Niu^{1

2}, Lingfang Lin³, Wengang Wei¹, Hao Liu¹, Hanxuan Lin¹, Kai Zhang¹, Tieying Yang⁴, Yunfang Kou¹, Jian Shao¹, Xingyu Gao⁴, Xiaoshan Xu⁵, Xiaoshan Wu⁶, Shuai Dong³, Lifeng Yin^{1

7}, Jian Shen^{1

7}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
² Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China.
³ Department of Physics, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China.
⁴ Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), Shanghai 201204, China.
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronom, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, USA.
⁶ Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 211189, China.
⁷ Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing 210093, China.

Abstract

For strongly correlated oxides, it has been a long-standing issue regarding the role of the chemical ordering of the dopants on the physical properties. Here, using unit cell by unit cell superlattice growth technique, we determine the role of chemical ordering of the Pr dopant in a colossal magnetoresistant (La(1-y)Pr(y))(1-x)Ca(x)MnO3 (LPCMO) system, which has been well known for its large length-scale electronic phase separation phenomena. Our experimental results show that the chemical ordering of Pr leads to marked reduction of the length scale of electronic phase separations. Moreover, compared with the conventional Pr-disordered LPCMO system, the Pr-ordered LPCMO system has a metal-insulator transition that is ∼100 K higher because the ferromagnetic metallic phase is more dominant at all temperatures below the Curie temperature.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't