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Research Highlight

Strain Doping: A New Approach to Understanding and Controlling Advanced Materials

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Inserting helium atoms (one is symbolized here by a red balloon) into a crystalline film (gold) allows for fine control of the elongation of the out-of-plane direction. The in-plane directions, in contrast, remain fixed by the underlying substrate (black).
Helium ions were used to control the length of a single axis in a crystal lattice, allowing for delicate manipulations of complex behavior. This accomplishment unlocks the door to engineering next-generation complex materials.

Crystal lattice structure is of central importance to understanding and controlling complex materials that offer untapped potential functionality, such as high-temperature superconductivity, multiferroicity, and colossal magnetoresistivity. However, current methods of controlling lattice structure are limited.

Researchers have overcome these restrictions by implanting helium atoms into a crystal, providing a means to finely control electron orbits, active temperature range, and electronic and magnetic behaviors. This approach can be applied to any epitaxially locked thin film across a wide spectrum of materials. This new ability is critical to fundamental studies and promises to accelerate commercial deployment of complex materials by providing a way to tune material properties using wafer-scale processing that can be implemented using existing ion-implantation infrastructure. Ultimately, strain doping may become an important means to tune tomorrow’s complex materials, similar to how electron/hole doping engineers today’s semiconducting materials.

 

Hangwen Guo, Shuai Dong, Philip D. Rack, John D. Budai, Christianne Beekman, Zheng Gai, Wolter Siemons, C. M. Gonzalez, R. Timilsina, Anthony T. Wong, Andreas Herklotz, Paul C. Snijders, Elbio Dagotto, and Thomas Z. Ward, “Strain Doping: Reversible Single-Axis Control of a Complex Oxide Lattice via Helium Implantation,” Physical Review Letters (in press 2015). 

 

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