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

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 La_0.7Sr_0.3MnO₃ (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.