Tailoring the anomalous Hall effect of SrRuO$_3$ thin films by strain: a first principles study

TL;DR

This study uses first principles calculations to show how strain-induced structural distortions in SrRuO$_3$ thin films significantly influence their electronic structure and anomalous Hall effect, revealing tunable properties via substrate strain.

Contribution

It provides a detailed first-principles analysis of how substrate-induced strain alters the structure and anomalous Hall response of SrRuO$_3$ thin films, highlighting the role of oxygen octahedral distortions.

Findings

Strain changes the octahedral tilting angle in SrRuO$_3$ films.

The anomalous Hall conductivity switches sign with strain.

Strain-mediated effects align with experimental observations.

Abstract

Motivated by the recently observed unconventional Hall effect in ultra-thin films of ferromagnetic SrRuO$_3$ (SRO) we investigate the effect of strain-induced oxygen octahedral distortion in the electronic structure and anomalous Hall response of the SRO ultra-thin films by virtue of density functional theory calculations. Our findings reveal that the ferromagnetic SRO films grown on SrTiO$_3$ (in-plane strain of $-$0.47$\%$) have an orthorhombic (both tilting and rotation) distorted structure and with an increasing amount of substrate-induced compressive strain the octahedral tilting angle is found to be suppressed gradually, with SRO films grown on NdGaO$_3$ (in-plane strain of $-$1.7$\%$) stabilized in the tetragonal distorted structure (with zero tilting). Our Berry curvature calculations predict a positive value of the anomalous Hall conductivity of $+$76\,S/cm at $-$1.7$\%$ strain, whereas it is found to be negative ($-$156\,S/cm) at $-$0.47$\%$ strain. We attribute the found behavior of the anomalous Hall effect to the nodal point dynamics in the electronic structure arising in response to tailoring the oxygen octahedral distortion driven by the substrate-induced strain. We also calculate strain-mediated anomalous Hall conductivity as a function of reduced magnetization obtained by scaling down the magnitude of the exchange field inside Ru atoms finding good qualitative agreement with experimental observations, which indicates a strong impact of longitudinal thermal fluctuations of Ru spin moments on the anomalous Hall effect in this system.