Large orbital polarization in a metallic square-planar nickelate
By Junjie Zhang, A. Botana, J. Freeland, D. Phelan, Hong Zheng, V. Pardo, M. Norman, J. Mitchell. Nature Physics, 2017
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
High-temperature cuprate superconductivity remains a defining problem in condensed-matter physics. Among myriad approaches to addressing this problem has been the study of alternative transition metal oxides with similar structures and 3d electron count that are suggested as proxies for cuprate physics. None of these analogues has been superconducting, and few are even metallic. Here, we report that the low-valent, quasi-two-dimensional trilayer compound Pr4Ni3O8 avoids a charge-stripe-ordered phase previously reported for La4Ni3O8, leading to a metallic ground state. X-ray absorption spectroscopy shows that metallic Pr4Ni3O8 exhibits a low-spin configuration with significant orbital polarization and pronounced dx2-y2 character in the unoccupied states above the Fermi energy, a hallmark of the cuprate superconductors. Density functional theory calculations corroborate this finding, and reveal that the dx2-y2 orbital dominates the near-Ef occupied states as well. Belonging to a regime of 3d electron count found for hole-doped cuprates, Pr4Ni3O8 thus represents one of the closest analogues to cuprates yet reported and a singularly promising candidate for high-Tc superconductivity if electron doping could be achieved. A careful study of the low-valent, quasi-two-dimensional trilayer metallic nickelate Pr4Ni3O8 is presented, revealing this system to be a close analogue of cuprate systems, and offering tantalizing hope that it may superconduct if appropriate electron doping can be achieved.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5d9016e05069cdaa3b2c6c92bd31050b80bcfaf
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- A substantial hybridization between correlated Ni-d orbital and itinerant electrons in infinite-layer nickelates (2019, background): “Those attempts started from infinitelayer nickelates [2, 5, 6], to LaNiO3/LaAlO3 superlattices [7–10], to tri-component nickelate heterostructures [11, 12] and to reduced Ruddlesden-Popper series [13, 14].”