Electrical and Fourier transform infrared properties of epitaxial SmNiO3 tensile strained thin film

摘要

We have grown epitaxial SmNiO3 thin films under tensile strain on SrTiO3 (001) substrate by pulsed laser deposition. A metal-insulator transition is found at about 394 K similar to observations made in bulk samples. The x-ray reciprocal space map suggests that the film undergoes partial strain relaxation, stabilizing the structure SmNiO3 with lower oxygen vacancies. The corresponding mid-infrared transmittance decreases when passing through the metal-insulator transition.