Enhancement of equilibrium fraction by heterogeneous nucleation in a "phase separated" half-doped manganite

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how temperature variation alone can enhance equilibrium phase fractions in a half-doped manganite through heterogeneous nucleation, affecting resistivity significantly.

Contribution

It reveals a novel temperature-driven mechanism for increasing equilibrium phase fractions via heterogeneous nucleation in phase-separated manganites.

Findings

Resistivity increases by over three times after second cool-down.

Heterogeneous nucleation enhances equilibrium phase fractions.

Temperature alone can control phase coexistence in the material.

Abstract

Glass-like arrest of kinetics has been observed across many magnetic first-order transitions. By traversing the two control variable H-T space, tunable coexisting fractions of arrested and equilibrium phases have been observed. We report here a fortuitous situation in a half-doped manganite sample, where these features occur by varying only temperature (T) along the H=0 line. The resistivity at 5 K rises by more than a factor of three provided second cool-down is effected from a specified intermediate T. This significant enhancement results from heterogeneous nucleation during second cool-down of regions that were kinetically arrested during first cool-down.