Engineering the magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of PrVO3 epitaxial oxide thin films by strain effects

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how strain engineering in PrVO3 thin films can significantly enhance their magnetic and magnetocaloric properties, making them promising for cryogenic cooling applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to tailor magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of PrVO3 thin films using strain effects, achieving record low coercive fields and high magnetocaloric effects.

Findings

Coercive magnetic field reduced from 2.4 T to 0.05 T in thin films.

Magnetocaloric effect reaches 56.8 J/kg K at 3 K under 6 T.

Enhanced magnetic moment observed in strained thin films.

Abstract

Combining multiple degrees of freedom in strongly-correlated materials such as transition-metal oxides would lead to fascinating magnetic and magnetocaloric features. Herein, the strain effects are used to markedly tailor the magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of PrVO3 thin films. The selection of appropriate thickness and substrate enables us to dramatically decrease the coercive magnetic field from 2.4 T previously observed in sintered PVO3 bulk to 0.05 T for compressive thin films making from the PrVO3 compound a nearly soft magnet. This is associated with a marked enhancement of the magnetic moment and the magnetocaloric effect that reach unusual maximum values of roughly 4.86 uB and 56.8 J/kg K in the magnetic field change of 6 T applied in the sample plane at the cryogenic temperature range (3 K), respectively. This work strongly suggests that taking advantage of different degrees of freedom and the exploitation of multiple instabilities in a nanoscale regime is a promising strategy for unveiling unexpected phases accompanied by a large magnetocaloric effect in oxides.