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Surface magnetism of strontium titanate

SrTiO3 plays a central role in oxide electronics. It is the substrate of choice for functional oxide heterostructures based on perovskite-structure thin-film stacks, and its surface or interface with a polar oxide such as LaAlO3 can become a two-dimensional conductor because of electronic reconstruction or the presence of oxygen defects. Inconsistent reports of magnetic order in SrTiO3 abound in the literature. Here we report a systematic experimental study aimed at establishing how and when SrTiO3 can develop a magnetic moment at room temperature. Polished 100, 110 or 111 crystal slices from four different suppliers are characterized before and after vacuum annealing at 750 °C, both in single-crystal and powdered form. Impurity content is analysed at the surface and in the bulk. Besides the underlying intrinsic diamagnetism of SrTiO3, magnetic signals are of three types-a Curie law susceptibility due to dilute magnetic impurities at the ppm level, a hysteretic, temperature-dependent ferromagnetic impurity contribution, and a practically-anhysteretic, defect-related temperature-independent component that saturates in about 200 mT. The latter component is intrinsic. It is often the largest, reaching 10 Bohr magnetons per nm2 of surface area or more and dominating the magnetic response in low fields at room temperature. It is associated with defects near the surface, and can be destroyed by treatment with Tiron (C6H4Na2O8S2), an electron donor molecule that forms a strong complex with titanium at the surface. The origin of this unusual high-temperature ferromagnetic-like response is discussed.