Journal
ADVANCED MATERIALS
Volume 33, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202004374
Keywords
intermediate phases; metal-insulator transitions; thin films; tweed textures; VO2
Categories
Funding
- Spanish Ministry of Industry, Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) [SEV-2015-0496, RTI2018-098537-B-C21]
- MINECO [MAT201677100-C2-1-P, MAT2017-82970-C2-R]
- Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) [2017 SGR 579]
- Spanish MICIU
- AEI
- EU FEDER [PGC2018-096955-B-C43]
- Generalitat de Catalunya [2017SGR1506]
- CERCA programme (Generalitat de Catalunya)
- Severo Ochoa programme for Centers of Excellence in RD of MINECO [SEV-2017-0706]
- European's Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [823717-ESTEEM3]
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Observation of ferroelastic tweed structures in vanadium dioxide on a nanometer scale provides new insights into its metal-insulator transition. Density functional theory calculations reveal that these structures are weaved by vanadium chains, acting as a bridge to the insulating state.
The observation of electronic phase separation textures in vanadium dioxide, a prototypical electron-correlated oxide, has recently added new perspectives on the long standing debate about its metal-insulator transition and its applications. Yet, the lack of atomically resolved information on phases accompanying such complex patterns still hinders a comprehensive understanding of the transition and its implementation in practical devices. In this work, atomic resolution imaging and spectroscopy unveils the existence of ferroelastic tweed structures on approximate to 5 nm length scales, well below the resolution limit of currently used spectroscopic imaging techniques. Moreover, density functional theory calculations show that this pretransitional fine-scale tweed, which on average looks and behaves like the standard metallic rutile phase, is in fact weaved by semi-dimerized chains of vanadium in a new monoclinic phase that represents a structural bridge to the monoclinic insulating ground state. These observations provide a multiscale perspective for the interpretation of existing data, whereby phase coexistence and structural intermixing can occur all the way down to the atomic scale.
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