Rapid Thermal Annealing of Double Perovskite Thin Films Formed by Polymer Assisted Deposition

The annealing process is an important step common to epitaxial films prepared by chemical solution deposition methods. It is so because the final microstructure of the films can be severely affected by the precise features of the thermal processing. In this work we analyze the structural and magnetic properties of double perovskite La2CoMnO6 and La2NiMnO6 epitaxial thin films prepared by polymer-assisted deposition (PAD) and crystallized by rapid thermal annealing (RTA). It is found that samples prepared by RTA have similar values of saturation magnetization and Curie temperature to their counterparts prepared by using conventional thermal annealing (CTA) processes, thus indicating low influence of the heating rates on the B-B’ site cationic ordering of the A2BB’O6 double perovskite structure. However, a deeper analysis of the magnetic behavior suggested some differences in the actual microstructure of the films.This research was founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015–04969) and Severo Ochoa FUNFUTURE (CEX2019-000917-S), SUMATE (RTI2018-095853-B-C21), and SPIN-CURIOX (RTI2018-099960- B-100) projects co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. Hailin Wang acknowledges financial support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC). This work has been performed in the framework of the Ph.D. program in Materials Science of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), through the CSC/UAB Joint Scholarship.Peer reviewe