Stabilization of metallic phase in V₂O₃ thin film

The tailoring and understanding of the metal-insulator transitions (MITs) in vanadium sesquioxide, V₂O₃, is of major interest for both applications and fundamental physics. V₂O₃ has been characterized by MIT and concurrent structural transition at ∼155 K; however, the nature of the MIT has remained more elusive. We investigated the MIT and the electronic structure (in metallic phase) of the pulsed laser deposition grown strained vanadium sesquioxide thin films on Si. The strained thin films synthesized here show the suppression (by ∼23 K) of the MIT to lower temperatures, whilst the structural transition temperature decreases only by ∼10 K. Our results systematically confirm that albeit the structural changes are crucial in V₂O₃, electronic transition seems to be of Mott-Hubbard type. Stabilization of the metallic phase in the strained V₂O₃ thin film has been manifested from resistivity data and observations of the increased crystal field and quasiparticle features.