Comparing Thickness and Doping-Induced Effects on the Normal States of Infinite-Layer Electron-Doped Cuprates: Is There Anything to Learn?

We grew SrLaCuO thin films and SrCuO/SrLaCuO/SrCuO trilayers by reflection high-energy diffraction-calibrated layer-by-layer molecular beam epitaxy, to study their electrical transport properties as a function of the doping and thickness of the central SrLaCuO layer. For the trilayer samples, as already observed in underdoped SLCO films, the electrical resistivity versus temperature curves as a function of the central layer thickness show, for thicknesses thinner than 20 unit cells, sudden upturns in the low temperature range with the possibility for identifying, in the normal state, the and a temperatures, respectively, separating high-temperature linear behavior and low-temperature quadratic dependence. By plotting the and values as a function of T for both the thin films and the trilayers, the data fall on the same curves. This result suggests that, for the investigated trilayers, the superconducting critical temperature is the important parameter able to describe the normal state properties and that, in the limit of very thin central layers, such properties are mainly influenced by the modification of the energy band structure and not by interface-related disorder.