Test on Manganite Thin Film crystallography

Aiming at designing novel magnetic materials, we are coordinating theoretical calculations and
fabrication of heterostructure systems magnetically tailored by strain engineering. We have grown films of
doped manganites that are notoriously sensitive to external fields but are difficult to model because of
the random positions of dopants and their inherent strongly correlated effects. As a start, a realistic
atomic structure is necessary to predict the magnetic properties but ab initio structures have proved to
be difficult to calculate. With this proposal, we aim at determining the crystallographic structure of a
manganite multilayer unit cell, in particular determining as accurately as possible the oxygen positions
that determine the magnetic couplings between Mn atoms. Resonant and non-resonant diffraction
methodologies will be combined to achieve this challenging thin film crystallography