Tunneling and enhanced magnetoresistance in Nd2/3Sr1/3MnO3 thin films with microcracks

We found that microcracks in thin Nd2/3Sr1/3MnO3 films create a series of intrinsic break junctions which are ideal for investigating tunneling phenomena in this system. A comparison of films with and without cracks, which have similar ferromagnetic Curie temperature (Tc) of 140–150 K, shows that the cracked film has a lower insulator to metal transition temperature TM (97 K vs 140 K), three orders of magnitude higher resistivity at TM, and two times larger magnetoresistance at 1 T near TM. At T>TM we observed that ln ραT−1/4 in the uncracked film while in the cracked film a ln ραT−1/2 dependence was found. This indicates that the conductivity in the first case is due to variable range hopping in three dimension, while in the second case it is dominated by thermally activated tunneling across the insulating barriers (the microcracks).