Thin Film Chromium Oxide Perovskites

Transition metal oxides (TMOs) have found use in various technologies. There has been mounting interest to harness the spin-charge interplay of TMOs and engineer new data storage devices relying on all-electrical (current or field) writing operations.

The relationship between magnetic order and electronic transport in TM-based compounds suggest that ferromagnets (FM) are typically metals, while antiferromagnets (AFM) are insulators. Compounds as such these are on the verge between different magnetic and electronic ground states, an ideal platform to design materials that are highly tunable by external parameters such as doping or magnetic field. Further, in these materials, the realization of room-temperature metallic conduction with robust AFM order could pave the way to new oxide-based magnetic access memories for fast magnetization switching using spin-transfer torque.

We propose to explore focuses on a family of transition metal oxides with a rich phenomenology: chromium-based oxide perovskites (chromites). We propose to study the combined charge and spin response in Cr-based perovskite thin films in the multidimensional domain spanned by strain, dimensionality (thickness), and doping (chemical substitution or oxygen removal). The novelty of our work lies in the exploration of a relatively new class of materials, and the impact of the proposed work is in the synergistic feedback between synthesis and characterization of the charge and spin response to reveal the driving forces behind the complex phenomenology of chromites.