Metallic diluted dimerization in VO2 tweeds
Sandiumenge Ortiz, Felip (Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona)
Rodríguez Domínguez, Laura (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia)
Pruneda, Miguel (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia)
Magen Dominguez, Cesar (Instituto de Nanociencia de Aragón)
Santiso, José (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia)
Catalan, Gustau (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia)

Date:	2021
Abstract:	The observation of electronic phase separation textures in vanadium dioxide, a prototypical electron-correlated oxide, has recently added new perspectives on the long standing debate about its metal-insulator transition and its applications. Yet, the lack of atomically resolved information on phases accompanying such complex patterns still hinders a comprehensive understanding of the transition and its implementation in practical devices. In this work, atomic resolution imaging and spectroscopy unveils the existence of ferroelastic tweed structures on ≈5 nm length scales, well below the resolution limit of currently used spectroscopic imaging techniques. Moreover, density functional theory calculations show that this pretransitional fine-scale tweed, which on average looks and behaves like the standard metallic rutile phase, is in fact weaved by semi-dimerized chains of vanadium in a new monoclinic phase that represents a structural bridge to the monoclinic insulating ground state. These observations provide a multiscale perspective for the interpretation of existing data, whereby phase coexistence and structural intermixing can occur all the way down to the atomic scale.
Grants:	European Commission 823717 Agencia Estatal de Investigación PGC2018-096955-B-C43 Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad RTI2018-098537-B-C21 Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad SEV-2017-0706 Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad MAT2017-82970-C2-R Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad MAT2016-77100-C2-1-P Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad SEV-2015-0496 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017/SGR-1506 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017/SGR-579
Note:	Altres ajuts: ICN2 was also supported by the CERCA programme (Generalitat de Catalunya).
Rights:	Tots els drets reservats.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar
Subject:	VO2 ; Metal-insulator transitions ; Tweed textures ; Thin films ; Intermediate phase
Published in:	Advanced materials, Vol. 33, issue 9 (March 2021) , art. 2004374, ISSN 1521-4095

DOI: 10.1002/adma.202004374

Postprint 36 p, 1.5 MB

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Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles