Abstract

We have investigated how the recently-developed water-leaching method for atomically-flat SrTiO3 (STO) substrates affects the transport properties of LaAlO3 (LAO) and STO heterointerfaces. Using pulsed laser deposition at identical growth conditions, we have synthesized epitaxial LAO thin-films on two different STO substrates, which are prepared by water-leaching and buffered hydrofluoric acid (BHF) etching methods. The structural, transport, and optical properties of LAO/STO heterostructures grown on water-leached substrates show the same high-quality as the samples grown on BHF-etched substrates. These results indicate that the water-leaching method can be used to grow complex oxide heterostructures with atomically well-defined heterointerfaces without safety concerns.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Scientific Reports, v. 6, article no. 23621, p. 1-6.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep23621

Funding Information

We acknowledge the support of National Science Foundation grant DMR-1454200 for sample synthesis, transport measurements, and optical spectroscopy in addition to a grant from the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation as per Grant Agreement #KSEF-148-502-14-328 with the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation. D.W.K. was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant (No. 2015001948).

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