  Thin films of strongly-correlated electron materials (SCEM) are often grown
epitaxially on planar substrates and typically have anisotropic properties that
are usually not captured by edge-mounted four-terminal electrical measurements,
which are primarily sensitive to in-plane conduction paths. Accordingly, the
correlated interactions in the out-of-plane (perpendicular) direction cannot be
measured but only inferred. We address this shortcoming and show here an
experimental technique in which the SCEM under study, in our case a 600
Angstrom-thick (La1-yPry)0.67Ca0.33MnO3 (LPCMO) film, serves as the base
electrode in a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) trilayer capacitor structure. This
unconventional arrangement allows for simultaneous determination of colossal
magnetoresistance (CMR) associated with dc transport parallel to the film
substrate and colossal magnetocapacitance (CMC) associated with ac transport in
the perpendicular direction. We distinguish two distinct strain-related
direction-dependent insulator-metal (IM) transitions and use Cole-Cole plots to
establish a heretofore unobserved collapse of the dielectric response onto a
universal scale-invariant power-law dependence over a large range of frequency,
temperature and magnetic field.
