Oxygen Ion Pumping across Atomically Designed Oxide Heterointerfaces

Abstract

Complex oxide heterointerfaces and heterostructures have demonstrated enormous emergent phenomena over the last decades, attributed to the reconstructions of mis‐matched crystalline structure, polarity, and spin ordering across the heterointerfaces. This work employs the heterostructures of La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 and CaFeO2.5 as model system to demonstrate an interface‐specific oxygen migration/reconstruction across the interfaces due to the mismatched chemical potential, which dramatically influences the ferromagnetic and electronic states of La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 layer. Specifically, the alternative stacking of octahedral (Oh) and tetrahedral (Td) layers in CaFeO2.5 are used to form two distinct heterointerfaces, namely the Oh‐Td and the Oh‐Oh interfaces with the adjacent La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 layer. Interestingly, the oxygen ion migrates toward opposite directions across the interface for these two cases, in which the CaFeO2.5 layer acts as an “oxygen pump” and manipulates the oxygen contents of its adjacent La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 layers. Such manipulation leads to a dramatically changed ferromagnetic transition temperature for the heterostructure with the Oh‐Td and Oh‐Oh interface. This work establishes a feasible and efficient strategy to control the oxygen ionic distribution through atomic‐scale interface design and opens up new opportunities to exploit emergent states at the complex oxide heterostructures through selective oxygen ion evolution.