Oxygen assisted deposition of Sr2FeMoO6 thin films on SrTiO3(1 0 0)

Epitaxial thin films of Sr2FeMoO6 (SFMO) were prepared by pulsed laser deposition on SrTiO3(1 0 0) substrate. Thin films have been grown under different gas environments and they were structurally characterised by XRD. In contrast to previous reports, deposition carried out in the presence of a small amount of O2 with Ar yields high-quality SFMO films with a saturation magnetic moment of 3.8 μB. These SFMO films were strained in such a way that they were elongated along the c-axis and compressed in the ab-axes directions. The large low-field magnetoresistance seen in these films has been attributed to the tunneling across the antisite boundaries