Probing Electronic and Magnetic Transitions of Short Periodic Nickelate Superlattices Using Synchrotron X-rays

Abstract

Introduction: Transition metal based oxide heterostructures exhibit diverse emergent phenomena e.g. two dimensional electron gas, superconductivity, non-collinear magnetic phase, ferroelectricity, polar vortices, topological Hall effect etc., which are absent in the constituent bulk oxides [1-6]. The microscopic understandings of these properties in such nanometer thick materials are extremely challenging. Synchrotron x-ray based techniques such as x-ray diffraction, x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), resonant x-ray scattering (RXS), resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS), x-ray photoemission spectroscopy, etc. are essential to elucidating the response of lattice, charge, orbital, and spin degrees of freedoms to the heterostructuring [7-14]. As a prototypical case of complex behavior, rare-earth nickelates SM is funded by a DST Nanomission grant (DST/NM/NS/2018/246) and a SERB Early