Confinement-Induced Isosymmetric Metal-Insulator Transition in Ultrathin Epitaxial V2O3 Films

Abstract

Dimensional confinement has shown to be an effective strategy to tune competing degrees of freedom in complex oxides. Here, we achieved atomic layered growth of trigonal vanadium sesquioxide (V₂O₃) by means of oxygen-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. This led to a series of high-quality epitaxial ultrathin V₂O₃ films down to unit cell thickness, enabling the study of the intrinsic electron correlations upon confinement. By electrical and optical measurements, we demonstrate a dimensional confinement-induced metal-insulator transition in these ultrathin films. We shed light on the Mott-Hubbard nature of this transition, revealing a vanishing quasiparticle weight as demonstrated by photoemission spectroscopy. Furthermore, we prove that dimensional confinement acts as an effective out-of-plane stress. This highlights the structural component of correlated oxides in a confined architecture, while opening an avenue to control both in-plane and out-of-plane lattice components by epitaxial strain and confinement, respectively.

Keywords: epitaxy; metal−insulator transition; molecular beam epitaxy; strong electron correlations; thin films; transition metal oxides.