Reversal of Strain State in a Mott Insulator Thin Film by Controlling Substrate Morphology
Reetendra Singh, Abhishek Rakshit, Galit Atiya, Mikhail Kalina, Yaron Kauffmann, Yoav Kalcheim · 2026
Read Reversal of Strain State in a Mott Insulator Thin Film by Controlling Substrate Morphology by Reetendra Singh, Abhishek Rakshit, Galit Atiya, Mikhail Kalina, Yaron Kauffmann, Yoav Kalcheim (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13472277.txt.
Description
Reetendra Singh and colleagues show in 2026 that the surface shape of a substrate, not just its crystal mismatch, can flip the strain inside a Mott insulator film. Vanadium sesquioxide films on sapphire feel two competing strains. One is a compressive squeeze from lattice mismatch. The other is a tensile pull from differing heat expansion. Annealing the sapphire left it either atomically flat or stepped.
On stepped surfaces, defects formed near the steps and let the compressive strain relax. The tensile pull then won, and the films stayed insulating at every temperature. On flat surfaces the squeeze held, suppressing the metal insulator transition instead. Resistance differed by many orders of magnitude between the two nominally identical films. The authors promote surface morphology as a practical dial for strain engineering in correlated oxides.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Reetendra Singh, Abhishek Rakshit, Galit Atiya, Mikhail Kalina, Yaron Kauffmann, Yoav Kalcheim |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 33270 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |