Explore the vast range of titles available.

Nickel-based complex oxides have served as a playground for decades in the quest for a copper-oxide analog of the high-temperature superconductivity. They may provide clues towards understanding the mechanism and an alternative route for high-temperature superconductors. The recent discovery of superconductivity in the infinite-layer nickelate thin films has fulfilled this pursuit. However, material synthesis remains challenging, direct demonstration of perfect diamagnetism is still missing, and understanding of the role of the interface and bulk to the superconducting properties is still lacking. Here, we show high-quality Nd 0.8 Sr 0.2 NiO 2 thin films with different thicknesses and demonstrate the interface and strain effects on the electrical, magnetic and optical properties. Perfect diamagnetism is achieved, confirming the occurrence of superconductivity in the films. Unlike the thick films in which the normal-state Hall-coefficient changes signs as the temperature decreases, the Hall-coefficient of films thinner than 5.5 nm remains negative, suggesting a thickness-driven band structure modification. Moreover, X-ray absorption spectroscopy reveals the Ni-O hybridization nature in doped infinite-layer nickelates, and the hybridization is enhanced as the thickness decreases. Consistent with band structure calculations on the nickelate/SrTiO 3 heterostructure, the interface and strain effect induce a dominating electron-like band in the ultrathin film, thus causing the sign-change of the Hall-coefficient. Nickelate superconductors attract enormous attention in the field of high-temperature superconductivity. Here the authors report observation of perfect diamagnetism and interfacial effect on the electronic structures in infinite layer Nd 0.8 Sr 0.2 NiO 2 superconductors.

The subtelomeric regions of organisms ranging from protists to fungi undergo a much higher rate of rearrangement than is observed in the rest of the genome. While characterizing these ∼40-kb regions of the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, we have identified a recent gene amplification event near the right telomere of chromosome 3 that involves a gene encoding an arsenite efflux transporter (ARR3). The 3,177-bp amplicon exists in a tandem array of 2–15 copies and is present exclusively in strains with the C. neoformans var. grubii subclade VNI A5 MLST profile. Strains bearing the amplification display dramatically enhanced resistance to arsenite that correlates with the copy number of the repeat; the origin of increased resistance was verified as transport-related by functional complementation of an arsenite transporter mutant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Subsequent experimental evolution in the presence of increasing concentrations of arsenite yielded highly resistant strains with the ARR3 amplicon further amplified to over 50 copies, accounting for up to ∼1% of the whole genome and making the copy number of this repeat as high as that seen for the ribosomal DNA. The example described here therefore represents a rare evolutionary intermediate—an array that is currently in a state of dynamic flux, in dramatic contrast to relatively common, static relics of past tandem duplications that are unable to further amplify due to nucleotide divergence. Beyond identifying and engineering fungal isolates that are highly resistant to arsenite and describing the first reported instance of microevolution via massive gene amplification in C. neoformans, these results suggest that adaptation through gene amplification may be an important mechanism that C. neoformans employs in response to environmental stresses, perhaps including those encountered during infection. More importantly, the ARR3 array will serve as an ideal model for further molecular genetic analyses of how tandem gene duplications arise and expand.

Among the vast magnetic heterostructures explored in Condensed Matter Physics, two contrasting interpretations of the hump-shaped Hall Effects remain ambiguous and debated, namely, the overlap of two opposite-signed Karplus-Luttinger Hall loops associated with inhomogeneous collinear domains with perpendicular anisotropy, or the Geometrical/Topological Hall Effect emanated from hexagnal close-packed lattice of Skyrmion ground state with smoothly varying non-collinear moments. Their similarity in topology implies difficulty in discrimination via magnetic imaging. Here, this ambiguity is overcome and clarified by the divergence exponent of hump peak fields extracted from Hall measurements with magnetic field rotation on several heterostructures. Their difference in sensitivity to in-plane fields reveals that the former mechanism involves higher uniaxial anisotropy than the latter, departing from the Skyrmion ground state regime by the Ginzburg-Landau framework of triple-q spin-wave superposition. Numerous material systems can be summarized into a single curve of divergence exponent versus the collinear quality factor, bridging the crossover of the two mentioned mechanisms.

Nickel-based complex oxides have served as a playground for decades in the quest for a copper-oxide analog of the high-temperature superconductivity. They may provide clues towards understanding the mechanism and an alternative route for high-temperature superconductors. The recent discovery of superconductivity in the infinite-layer nickelate thin films has fulfilled this pursuit. However, material synthesis remains challenging, direct demonstration of perfect diamagnetism is still missing, and understanding of the role of the interface and bulk to the superconducting properties is still lacking. Here, we show high-quality Nd0.8Sr0.2NiO2 thin films with different thicknesses and demonstrate the interface and strain effects on the electrical, magnetic and optical properties. Perfect diamagnetism is achieved, confirming the occurrence of superconductivity in the films. Unlike the thick films in which the normal-state Hall-coefficient changes signs as the temperature decreases, the Hall-coefficient of films thinner than 5.5 nm remains negative, suggesting a thickness-driven band structure modification. Moreover, X-ray absorption spectroscopy reveals the Ni-O hybridization nature in doped infinite-layer nickelates, and the hybridization is enhanced as the thickness decreases. Consistent with band structure calculations on the nickelate/SrTiO3 heterostructure, the interface and strain effect induce a dominating electron-like band in the ultrathin film, thus causing the sign-change of the Hall-coefficient.

Nickel-based complex oxides have served as a playground for decades in the quest for a copper-oxide analog of the high-temperature superconductivity. They may provide clues towards understanding the mechanism and an alternative route for high-temperature superconductors. The recent discovery of superconductivity in the infinite-layer nickelate thin films has fulfilled this pursuit. However, material synthesis remains challenging, direct demonstration of perfect diamagnetism is still missing, and understanding of the role of the interface and bulk to the superconducting properties is still lacking. Here, we show high-quality Nd Sr NiO thin films with different thicknesses and demonstrate the interface and strain effects on the electrical, magnetic and optical properties. Perfect diamagnetism is achieved, confirming the occurrence of superconductivity in the films. Unlike the thick films in which the normal-state Hall-coefficient changes signs as the temperature decreases, the Hall-coefficient of films thinner than 5.5 nm remains negative, suggesting a thickness-driven band structure modification. Moreover, X-ray absorption spectroscopy reveals the Ni-O hybridization nature in doped infinite-layer nickelates, and the hybridization is enhanced as the thickness decreases. Consistent with band structure calculations on the nickelate/SrTiO heterostructure, the interface and strain effect induce a dominating electron-like band in the ultrathin film, thus causing the sign-change of the Hall-coefficient.

The superconducting infinite-layer nickelate family has risen as a promising platform for revealing the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity. However, its challenging material synthesis has obscured effort in understanding the nature of its ground state and low-lying excitations, which is a prerequisite for identifying the origin of the Cooper pairing in high-temperature superconductors. In particular, the superconducting gap symmetry of nickelates has hardly been investigated and remains controversial. Here, we report the pairing symmetry of the infinite-layer nickelates determined by London penetration depth measurements in neodymium-based (Nd,Sr)NiO\\(_2\\) and lanthanide-based (La,Ca)NiO\\(_2\\) thin films of high crystallinity. A rare-earth-specific order parameter is observed. While the lanthanide nickelates follow dirty line-node behaviour, the neodymium-counterpart exhibits nodeless order parameters such as the \\((d+is)\\) wave. In contrast to the cuprates, our results suggest that the superconducting order parameter in nickelates is beyond a single \\(d_(x^2-y^2 )\\)-wave gap. Furthermore, the superfluid density shows a long tail near the superconducting transition temperature which is consistent with the emergence of a two-dimensional to three-dimensional crossover in the superconducting state. These observations challenge the early theoretical framework and propel further experimental and theoretical interests in the pairing nature of the infinite-layer nickelate family.

Superconductivity in infinite-layer nickelates holds exciting analogies with that of cuprates, with similar structures and \\(3d\\)-electron count. Using resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) we studied electronic and magnetic excitations and charge density correlations in Nd\\(_{1-x}\\)Sr\\(_{x}\\)NiO\\(_2\\) thin films with and without an SrTiO\\(_3\\) capping layer. We observe dispersing magnons only in the capped samples, progressively dampened at higher doping. In addition, we detect an elastic resonant scattering peak in the uncapped \\(x=0\\) compound at wave vector (1/3,0), remindful of the charge order signal in hole doped cuprates. The peak weakens at \\(x=0.05\\) and disappears in the superconducting \\(x=0.20\\) film. The uncapped samples also present a higher degree of Ni\\(3d\\)-Nd\\(5d\\) hybridization and a smaller anisotropy of the Ni\\(3d\\) occupation with respect to the capped samples. The role of the capping on the possible hydrogen incorporation or on other mechanisms responsible for the electronic reconstruction far from the interface remains to be understood.

We report the observation of superconductivity in infinite-layer Ca-doped LaNiO\\(_2\\) (La\\(_{1-x}\\)Ca\\(_x\\)NiO\\(_2\\)) thin films and construct their phase diagram. Unlike the metal-insulator transition in Nd- and Pr-based nickelates, the undoped and underdoped La1-xCaxNiO2 thin films are entirely insulating from 300 K down to 2 K. A superconducting dome is observed at 0.15

Paper

Share this book

Add to My Shelf