Giant oscillating thermopower at oxide interfaces

Understanding the nature of charge carriers at the LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃ interface is one of the major open issues in the full comprehension of the charge confinement phenomenon in oxide heterostructures. Here, we investigate thermopower to study the electronic structure in LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃ at low temperature as a function of gate field. In particular, under large negative gate voltage, corresponding to the strongly depleted charge density regime, thermopower displays high negative values of the order of 10⁴–10⁵μVK⁻¹, oscillating at regular intervals as a function of the gate voltage. The huge thermopower magnitude can be attributed to the phonon-drag contribution, while the oscillations map the progressive depletion and the Fermi level descent across a dense array of localized states lying at the bottom of the Ti 3d conduction band. This study provides direct evidence of a localized Anderson tail in the two-dimensional electron liquid at the LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃ interface.