Controlled temperature broadening of colossal magnetoresistance in a manganite heterostructure

An intrinsic characteristic of the “colossal” magnetoresistance manganite compounds is that the resistance and the magnetoresistance vary strongly with temperature over the small temperature regime in which the magnetoresistance is exceptionally large. We propose a heterostructure constructed of layers of varying composition manganites which extends the regime of large magnetoresistance and greatly broadens the sharp peak in resistance. Data from a prototype heterostructure are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.