Electronic structure of metallic delafossite oxides
Metallic delafossites are materials which show intriguing properties revealed over the past years. This includes ultra-high conductivity, unconventional magnetism, and the potential to host strongly spin-orbit coupled states at their surfaces and interfaces. Structurally, they are layered materials with triangular in-plane lattices of transition metal atoms. This results in a quasi two-dimensional Fermi surface and very anisotropic transport properties.
We study the Fermi surface topography of these compounds with our newly built state-of-the-art torque magnetometer in order to learn more about the electron interactions in the material and their influence on the transport properties. Quantum oscillation measurements give such a detailed knowledge of the Fermi surface and especially its c-axis warping parameters, that DFT calculations can be improved by a direct comparison. A comparison of the different compounds (PtCoO2 and PdRhO2) in the series allows to tune the spin orbit coupling and interactions terms.