Anisotropic stress relief mechanism in epitaxial La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 films

We report an anisotropic misfit stress relief mechanism in thin La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 (LSMO) films coherently grown on NdGaO(3()110) substrates. These results are uniquely related to the orthorhombicity of the LSMO. The x-ray diffraction measurements and quantitative simulations demonstrate that biaxial mismatch stress is relieved differently along in-plane directions perpendicular to each other: in the [1 (1) over bar0] direction stress is accommodated by decrease of the gamma angle of the orthorhombic LSMO unit cell, while in the [001] direction stress is partially relieved by periodic lattice modulations. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3249583]