Transition metal oxides display a great variety of quantum electronic behaviours where correlations often play an important role. The achievement of high quality epitaxial interfaces involving such materials gives a unique opportunity to engineer artificial structures where new electronic orders take place. One of the most striking result in this area is the recent observation of a two-dimensional electron gas at the interface between a strongly correlated Mott insulator LaTiO3 and a band insulator SrTiO3. The mechanism responsible for such a behaviour is still under debate. In particular, the influence of the nature of the insulator has to be clarified. Here we show that despite the expected electronic correlations, LaTiO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures undergo a superconducting transition at a critical temperature Tc=300 mK. We have found that the superconducting electron gas is confined over a typical thickness of 12 nm. We discuss the electronic properties of this system and review the possible scenarios.
@article{arxiv.1002.3737,
title = {Two-dimensional superconductivity at a Mott-Insulator/Band-Insulator interface: LaTiO3/SrTiO3},
author = {Johan Biscaras and Nicolas Bergeal and Akhilesh Kushwaha and Thomas Wolf and Ankur Rastogi and Ramesh Chandra Budhani and Jerome Lesueur},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.3737},
year = {2015}
}