Tricia L. Meyer

Enhanced Bifunctional Oxygen Catalysis in Strained LaNiO3 Perovskites

Strain is known to greatly influence low-temperature oxygen electrocatalysis on noble metal films, leading to significant enhancements in bifunctional activity essential for fuel cells and metal-air batteries. However, its catalytic impact on transition-metal oxide thin films, such as perovskites, is not widely understood. Here, we epitaxially strain the conducting perovskite LaNiO3 to systematically determine its influence on both the oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reaction. Uniquely, we found that compressive strain could significantly enhance both reactions, yielding a bifunctional catalyst that surpasses the performance of noble metals such as Pt. We attribute the improved bifunctionality to strain-induced splitting of the eg orbitals, which can customize orbital asymmetry at the surface. Analogous to strain-induced shifts in the d-band center of noble metals relative to the Fermi level, such splitting can dramatically affect catalytic activity in this perovskite and other potentially more active oxides.

Enhancing Perovskite Electrocatalysis through Strain Tuning of the Oxygen Deficiency

Oxygen vacancies in transition-metal oxides facilitate catalysis critical for energy storage and generation. However, promoting vacancies at the lower temperatures required for operation in devices such as metal-air batteries and portable fuel cells has proven elusive. Here we used thin films of perovskite-based strontium cobaltite (SrCoOx) to show that epitaxial strain is a powerful tool for manipulating the oxygen content under conditions consistent with the oxygen evolution reaction, yielding increasingly oxygen-deficient states in an environment where the cobaltite would normally be fully oxidized. The additional oxygen vacancies created through tensile strain enhance the cobaltites catalytic activity toward this important reaction by over an order of magnitude, equaling that of precious-metal catalysts, including IrO2. Our findings demonstrate that strain in these oxides can dictate the oxygen stoichiometry independent of ambient conditions, allowing unprecedented control over oxygen vacancies essential in catalysis near room temperature.

Growth control of the oxidation state in vanadium oxide thin films

Precise control of the chemical valence or oxidation state of vanadium in vanadium oxide thin films is highly desirable for not only fundamental research but also technological applications that utilize the subtle change in the physical properties originating from the metal-insulator transition (MIT) near room temperature. However, due to the multivalent nature of vanadium and the lack of a good understanding on growth control of the oxidation state, stabilization of phase pure vanadium oxides with a single oxidation state is extremely challenging. Here, we systematically varied the growth conditions to clearly map out the growth window for preparing phase pure epitaxial vanadium oxides by pulsed laser deposition for providing a guideline to grow high quality thin films with well-defined oxidation states of V2+3O3, V+4O2, and V2+5O5. A well pronounced MIT was only observed in VO2 films grown in a very narrow range of oxygen partial pressure P(O2). The films grown either in lower (<10 mTorr) or higher P(O2...

Emerging magnetism and anomalous Hall effect in iridate–manganite heterostructures

Strong Coulomb repulsion and spin–orbit coupling are known to give rise to exotic physical phenomena in transition metal oxides. Initial attempts to investigate systems, where both of these fundamental interactions are comparably strong, such as 3d and 5d complex oxide superlattices, have revealed properties that only slightly differ from the bulk ones of the constituent materials. Here we observe that the interfacial coupling between the 3d antiferromagnetic insulator SrMnO3 and the 5d paramagnetic metal SrIrO3 is enormously strong, yielding an anomalous Hall response as the result of charge transfer driven interfacial ferromagnetism. These findings show that low dimensional spin–orbit entangled 3d–5d interfaces provide an avenue to uncover technologically relevant physical phenomena unattainable in bulk materials.

Oxygen diffusion pathways in brownmillerite SrCoO2.5: Influence of structure and chemical potential

To design and discover new materials for next-generation energy materials such as solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), a fundamental understanding of their ionic properties and behaviors is essential. The potential applicability of a material for SOFCs is critically determined by the activation energy barrier of oxygen along various diffusion pathways. In this work, we investigate interstitial-oxygen (Oi) diffusion in brownmillerite oxide SrCoO2.5, employing a first-principles approach. Our calculations indicate highly anisotropic ionic diffusion pathways, which result from its anisotropic crystal structure. The one-dimensional-ordered oxygen vacancy channels are found to provide the easiest diffusion pathway with an activation energy barrier height of 0.62 eV. The directions perpendicular to the vacancy channels have higher energy barriers for Oint diffusion. In addition, we have studied migration barriers for oxygen vacancies that could be present as point defects within the material. This in turn could also facilitate the transport of oxygen. Interestingly, for oxygen vacancies, the lowest barrier height was found to occur within the octahedral layer with an energy of 0.82 eV. Our results imply that interstitial migration would be highly one-dimensional in nature. Oxygen vacancy transport, on the other hand, could preferentially occur in the two-dimensional octahedral plane.

Surface control of epitaxial manganite films via oxygen pressure

The trend to reduce device dimensions demands increasing attention to atomic-scale details of structure of thin films as well as to pathways to control it. This is of special importance in the systems with multiple competing interactions. We have used in situ scanning tunneling microscopy to image surfaces of La5/8Ca3/8MnO3 films grown by pulsed laser deposition. The atomically resolved imaging was combined with in situ angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. We find a strong effect of the background oxygen pressure during deposition on structural and chemical features of the film surface. Deposition at 50 mTorr of O2 leads to mixed-terminated film surfaces, with B-site (MnO2) termination being structurally imperfect at the atomic scale. A relatively small reduction of the oxygen pressure to 20 mTorr results in a dramatic change of the surface structure leading to a nearly perfectly ordered B-site terminated surface with only a small fraction of A-site (La,Ca)O termination. This is accompanied, however, by surface roughening at a mesoscopic length scale. The results suggest that oxygen has a strong link to the adatom mobility during growth. The effect of the oxygen pressure on dopant surface segregation is also pronounced: Ca surface segregation is decreased with oxygen pressure reduction.

Controlling octahedral rotations in a perovskite via strain doping

The perovskite unit cell is the fundamental building block of many functional materials. The manipulation of this crystal structure is known to be of central importance to controlling many technologically promising phenomena related to superconductivity, multiferroicity, mangetoresistivity, and photovoltaics. The broad range of properties that this structure can exhibit is in part due to the centrally coordinated octahedra bond flexibility, which allows for a multitude of distortions from the ideal highly symmetric structure. However, continuous and fine manipulation of these distortions has never been possible. Here, we show that controlled insertion of He atoms into an epitaxial perovskite film can be used to finely tune the lattice symmetry by modifying the local distortions, i.e., octahedral bonding angle and length. Orthorhombic SrRuO3 films coherently grown on SrTiO3 substrates are used as a model system. Implanted He atoms are confirmed to induce out-of-plane strain, which provides the ability to controllably shift the bulk-like orthorhombically distorted phase to a tetragonal structure by shifting the oxygen octahedra rotation pattern. These results demonstrate that He implantation offers an entirely new pathway to strain engineering of perovskite-based complex oxide thin films, useful for creating new functionalities or properties in perovskite materials.

Enhancing interfacial magnetization with a ferroelectric

Ferroelectric control of the electronic and magnetic properties of a correlated oxide provides new opportunities for fundamental science and practical device applications. However, the exploding interest in ferroelectric control of magnetic interfaces, which typically happens in a few nanometers, has been inhibited by the lack of appropriate characterization techniques. Here, the authors have used polarized neutron reflectivity (PNR), a nondestructive yet powerful technique, to directly probe the evolution of the interfacial magnetism at the interface between ferromagnetic La

Reversible Control of Interfacial Magnetism through Ionic-Liquid-Assisted Polarization Switching

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Symmetry‐Driven Atomic Rearrangement at a Brownmillerite–Perovskite Interface

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