Combinatorial Growth of Vertically Aligned Nanocomposite Thin Films for Accelerated Exploration in Composition Variation

Combinatorial growth is capable of creating a compositional gradient for thin film materials and thus has been adopted to explore composition variation mostly for metallic alloy thin films and some dopant concentrations for ceramic thin films. This study uses a combinatorial pulsed laser deposition method to successfully fabricate two-phase oxide-oxide vertically aligned nanocomposite (VAN) thin films of La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 (LSMO)-NiO with variable composition across the film area. The LSMO-NiO compositional gradient across the film alters the two-phase morphology of the VAN through varying nanopillar size and density. Additionally, the magnetic anisotropy and magnetoresistance properties of the nanocomposite thin films increase with increasing NiO composition. This demonstration of a combinatorial method for VAN growth can increase the efficiency of nanocomposite thin film research by allowing all possible compositions of thin film materials to be explored in a single deposition. A combinatorial growth method, as an accelerated approach to explore the composition variation of vertically aligned nanocomposites, using LaSrMnO3:NiO as a model system, is presented. Tunable composition, two-phase morphology, magnetic properties, and magnetoresistance properties are effectively tuned in one sample, achieved in a single run.image & COPY; 2023 WILEY-VCH GmbH