LTO_full paper 20150217.pdf (3.21 MB)
Anomalous magnetoresistance in the spinel superconductor LiTi2O4
journal contribution
posted on 2015-08-10, 08:58 authored by K. Jin, G. He, X. Zhang, S. Maruyama, S. Yasui, R. Suchoski, J. Shin, Y. Jiang, H.S. Yu, J. Yuan, L. Shan, Feodor Kusmartsev, R.L. Greene, I. TakeuchiLiTi2O4 is a unique compound in that it is the only known spinel oxide superconductor. The
lack of high quality single crystals has thus far prevented systematic investigations of its
transport properties. Here we report a careful study of transport and tunnelling spectroscopy
in epitaxial LiTi2O4 thin films. An unusual magnetoresistance is observed which changes from
nearly isotropic negative to prominently anisotropic positive as the temperature is decreased.
We present evidence that shows that the negative magnetoresistance likely stems from
the suppression of local spin fluctuations or spin-orbit scattering centres. The positive
magnetoresistance suggests the presence of an orbital-related state, also supported by the
fact that the superconducting energy gap decreases as a quadratic function of magnetic field.
These observations indicate that the spin-orbital fluctuations play an important role in LiTi2O4
in a manner similar to high-temperature superconductors.
Funding
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (DMR-1104256 and 1410665), AFOSR-MURI (FA9550-09-1-0603), AFOSR (FA95501410332), the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB07020100) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant (11474338, 11322432).
History
School
- Science
Department
- Physics
Published in
Nature CommunicationsVolume
6Citation
JIN, K. ...et al., 2015. Anomalous magnetoresistance in the spinel superconductor LiTi2O4. Nature Communications, 6. article no. 7183.Publisher
© Macmillan Publishers Limited.Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-04-10Publication date
2015-05-20Notes
This is the accepted manuscript version of the paper. The definitive published version can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8183ISSN
2041-1723eISSN
2041-1723Publisher version
Language
- en