Interplay of Doping and Structural Modulation in Superconducting Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6+d thin films

TL;DR

This study investigates how La doping and oxygen content influence the structural modulation in Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6+d thin films, revealing La content as the primary factor affecting modulation amplitude.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effects of La doping and oxygen variation on the structural modulation in Bi-based cuprate thin films, highlighting La content as the dominant influence.

Findings

Structural modulation amplitude decreases with increasing La content.

Oxygen content has minimal impact on modulation for x>0.2.

La doping primarily governs the modulation behavior.

Abstract

We have studied the evolution of the structural modulation in epitaxial, c-axis oriented, Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6+d thin films when varying the La content x and for a given x as a function of oxygen content. A series of thin films with 0<x<0.8 have been prepared in-situ by rf magnetron sputtering and characterized by R(T) measurements and RBS, TEM and X-Ray diffraction techniques. The oxygen content of each individual film was varied by thermal annealing across the phase diagram. The evolution of the structural modulation has been thoroughly studied by X-Ray diffraction in determining the variation of the amplitude of satellite reflections in special 2 axes 2theta /theta-theta scans (reciprocal space scans). It is shown that the amplitude of the modulation along the c-axis decreases strongly when x increases from 0 to 0.2. It is demonstrated that this variation is essentially governed by La content x and that changing the oxygen content by thermal treatments has a much lower influence, even becoming negligible for x>0.2. Such study is important to understand the electronical properties of Bi2Sr2-xLaxCuO6+d thin films.