Epitaxial stabilization of an orthorhombic Mg-Ti-O superconductor
| Autor: | Ni, Zhuang, Hu, Wei, Zhang, Qinghua, Zhang, Yanmin, Xiong, Peiyu, Li, Qian, Yuan, Jie, Chen, Qihong, Zhu, Beiyi, Zhang, Hua, Dong, Xiaoli, Gu, Lin, Jin, Kui |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevB.105.214511 |
| Popis: | The family of titanium oxide superconductors exhibits many intriguing phenomena comparable to cuprates and iron pnictides/chalcogenides, and thus provides an ideal platform to contrastively study the unconventional pairing mechanism of high-temperature superconductors. Here, we successfully deposit superconducting Mg-Ti-O films on MgAl$_2$O$_4$ substrates with three principal orientations by ablating a MgTi$_2$O$_4$ target. Particularly, it is striking to observed that a single-crystalline film of an unintended structure has been grown on the (011)-oriented substrate, with the highest zero resistance transition temperature ($T_{\mathrm{c}0}$) of 5.0 K among them. The film has a highly reduced Mg/Ti ratio and an orthorhombic Ti$_9$O$_{10}$-like structure (denoted as Mg: Ti$_9$O$_{10}$), demonstrated by further characterizations of chemical composition and structure. Such a structure is unstable in bulk but favorable to be epitaxially stabilized on the (011)-surface of MgAl$_2$O$_4$ due to a relatively small strain at the formed interface. An isotropic upper critical field ($B_{\mathrm{c}2}$) up to 13.7 T that breaks the Pauli limit is observed in the Mg: Ti$_9$O$_{10}$ film, analogous to other superconducting titanium oxides. The similarity points to a common origin for the superconductivity in the family, which will provide valuable opinions for the mechanism of unconventional superconductivity in transition metal compounds. Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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