Weakly-Correlated nature of ferromagnetism in nonsymmorphic CrO2 revealed by bulk-sensitive soft-X-ray ARPES

Abstract

Chromium dioxide CrO 2 belongs to a class of materials called ferromagnetic half-metals, whose peculiar aspect is that they act as a metal in one spin orientation and as a semiconductor or insulator in the opposite one. Despite numerous experimental and theoretical studies motivated by technologically important applications of this material in spintronics, its fundamental properties such as momentum-resolved el ectron dispersions and the Fermi surface have so far remained experimentally inaccessible because of metastability of its surface, which instantly reduces to amorphous Cr 2 O 3 . In this work, we demonstrate that direct access to the native electronic structure of CrO 2 can be achieved with soft-x-ray angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy whose large probing depth penetrates through the Cr 2 O 3 layer. For the first time, the electronic dispersions and Fermi surface of CrO 2 are measured, which are fundamental prerequisites to solve the long debate on the nature of electronic correlations in this material. Since density functional theory augmented by a relatively weak local Coulomb repulsion gives an exhaustive description of our spectroscopic data, we rule out strong-coupling theories of CrO 2 . Crucial for the correct interpretation of our experimental data in terms of the valence-band dispersions is the understanding of a nontrivial spectral response of CrO 2 caused by interference effects in the photoemission process originating from the nonsymmorphic space group of the rutile crystal structure of CrO 2

Publication
Phys. Rev. X