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

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.