Study on superconducting properties of CeIrIn₅thin films grown via pulsed laser deposition

We report the growth of CeIrIn₅thin films with different crystal orientations on a MgF₂(001) substrate using pulsed laser deposition technique. X-ray diffraction analysis showed that the thin films were either mainlya-axis-oriented (TF1) or a combination ofa- andc-axis-oriented (TF2). The characteristic features of heavy-fermion superconductors, i.e. Kondo coherence and superconductivity, were clearly observed, where the superconducting transition temperature (T_c) and Kondo coherence temperature (T_coh) are 0.58 K and 41 K for TF1 and 0.52 K and 37 K for TF2, respectively. The temperature dependencies of the upper critical field (H₂) of both thin films and the CeIrIn₅single crystal revealed a scaling behavior, indicating that the nature of unconventional superconductivity has not been changed in the thin film. The successful synthesis of CeIrIn₅thin films is expected to open a new avenue for novel quantum phases that may have been difficult to explore in the bulk crystalline samples.