Growth, Electrical and Magnetic Investigations of Manganese Oxide Thin FilMS

Abstract

In the last few decades, research in oxides has grown up tremendously due to the observation of emergent multifunctional phenomena, e.g., ferromagnetism, ferroelectricity, multiferroicity, high-temperature superconductivity, metal-insulator transitions, giant magnetoresistance and more recently the topological Hall Effect. These phenomena arise because of the interplay between the fundamental degrees of freedoms, which are charge, lattice, spin, and orbital. Mostly, oxide-based materials are found to be less susceptible to degradation in air, giving an ideal platform for next-generation device applications. In my final year project, by using Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD), I have grown Mn3O4 thinfilms. This oxide shows huge promises for tunable magnetic and dielectric properties. The x-ray diffraction has been demonstrated that we have oriented growth along the [h0h] directions. The XPS confirms that our thinfilm is Mn3O4, removing doubt of the presence isostructural gamma phase of Mn2O3. We have a ferrimagnetic transition at the 42K, and magnetodielectric data also shows this transition along with transitions at 40K and 33K in compliance with reported data. However, we observe the coercivity of 8600Oe at 5K, which is almost three times the reported data.