Oxygen vacancies in the perovskite insulator SrTiO3 free electrons that couple with other physical degrees of freedom such as lattice, orbital, and spin. This leads to the emergence of exotic quantum states such as superconductivity and unusual ferromagnetism. We perform density-functional theory and dynamical mean-field theory calculations and demonstrate that the orientation and ordering of the TiO5 pentahedra plays a crucial role. Specifically, for vacancy-rich SrTiO3−δ (δ∼0.5), we find a chiral ordering of the TiO5 pentahedra in a sixfold superlattice. This chiral structure is accompanied by a chiral magnetic state with a net moment in the (111) direction at room temperature, which can explain several experimental observations.
@article{arxiv.2306.07120,
title = {Chiral magnetism and ordering of oxygen vacancies in SrTiO$_{2.5}$},
author = {Liang Si and Xiaochao Wang and Paul Worm and Wei Peng and Minjae Kim and Lingfei Wang and Karsten Held},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.07120},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
10 pages, 8 figures including supplementary materials