Oxygen Defect Engineered Magnetism of La2NiMnO6 Thin Films

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how oxygen annealing modifies the structure and magnetic properties of La2NiMnO6 thin films, revealing that oxygen defect engineering can tune ferromagnetic transition temperatures and saturation magnetization.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how oxygen annealing influences epitaxial strain, defect distribution, and magnetic interactions in La2NiMnO6 thin films.

Findings

Longer annealing reduces saturation magnetization.

Oxygen annealing increases ferromagnetic transition temperature.

Oxygen defect reduction enhances magnetic interactions.

Abstract

The double perovskite La2NiMnO6 (LNMO) exhibits complex magnetism due to the competition of magnetic interactions that are strongly affected by structural and magnetic inhomogeneities. In this work, we study the effect of oxygen annealing on the structure and magnetism of epitaxial thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition. The key observations are that a longer annealing time leads to a reduction of saturation magnetization and an enhancement in the ferromagnetic transition temperature. We explain these results based upon epitaxial strain and oxygen defect engineering. The oxygen enrichment by annealing caused a decrease in the volume of the perovskite lattice. This increased the epitaxial strain of the films that are in-plane locked to the SrTiO3 substrate. The enhanced strain caused a reduction in the saturation magnetization due to randomly distributed anti-site defects. The reduced oxygen defects concentration in the films due to the annealing in oxygen improved the ferromagnetic long-range interaction and caused an increase in the magnetic transition temperature.