Crossover between superconductivity and magnetism in SrRuO3 mesocrystal embedded YBa2Cu3O7-x heterostructures

Vandrangi Suresh; Jheng-Cyuan Lin; Heng-Jui Liu; Zaoli Zhang; Ping-Chih Chiang; Yu-Ching Hsun; Yi-Chun Chen; Jiunn-Yuan Lin; Ying-Hao Chu

doi:10.1039/c6nr05262b

Crossover between superconductivity and magnetism in SrRuO₃ mesocrystal embedded YBa₂Cu₃O_7-x heterostructures

Nanoscale. 2016 Nov 3;8(43):18454-18460. doi: 10.1039/c6nr05262b.

Authors

Vandrangi Suresh¹, Jheng-Cyuan Lin², Heng-Jui Liu², Zaoli Zhang³, Ping-Chih Chiang⁴, Yu-Ching Hsun⁴, Yi-Chun Chen⁵, Jiunn-Yuan Lin⁴, Ying-Hao Chu⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, 701, Taiwan and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, 300, Taiwan. yhc@nctu.edu.tw.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, 300, Taiwan. yhc@nctu.edu.tw.
³ Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.
⁴ Department of Electrophysics, National Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, 300, Taiwan.
⁵ Department of Physics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, 701, Taiwan.
⁶ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, 300, Taiwan. yhc@nctu.edu.tw and Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei 105, Taiwan.

PMID: 27778015
DOI: 10.1039/c6nr05262b

Abstract

The competition between superconductivity and ferromagnetism poses great challenges and has attracted renewed interest for applications in novel spintronic devices. In order to emphasize their interactions, we fabricated a heterostructure composed of superconducting YBa₂Cu₃O_7-δ (YBCO) film embedded with itinerant ferromagnetic SrRuO₃ (SRO) mesocrystals. Starting from a doping concentration of 10 vol% of SRO mesocrystal in a YBCO matrix, corresponding to the density of SRO nanocrystals ∼5 × 10⁹ cm^-2, which exhibits the typical characteristic of a metal-superconductor transition, and then increasing the magnetic interactions as a function of SRO embedment, the electronic correlation and the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism throughout the temperature regime were investigated. A metal-insulator transition in the normal state of YBCO and a crossover between superconductivity and magnetism at low temperatures were found upon increasing the density of nano-size SRO crystallites in the YBCO matrix as a consequence of competing interactions between these two ordered phases.