%0 Journal Article
%A Mairoser, Thomas
%A Mundy, Julia A.
%A Melville, Alexander
%A Hodash, Daniel
%A Cueva, Paul
%A Held, Rainer
%A Glavic, Artur
%A Schubert, Jürgen
%A Muller, David A.
%A Schlom, Darrell G.
%A Schmehl, Andreas
%T High-quality EuO thin films the easy way via topotactic transformation
%J Nature Communications
%V 6
%@ 2041-1723
%C London
%I Nature Publishing Group
%M FZJ-2015-04967
%P 7716 -
%D 2015
%X Epitaxy is widely employed to create highly oriented crystalline films. A less appreciated, butnonetheless powerful means of creating such films is via topotactic transformation, in which achemical reaction transforms a single crystal of one phase into a single crystal of a differentphase, which inherits its orientation from the original crystal. Topotactic reactions may beapplied to epitactic films to substitute, add or remove ions to yield epitactic films of differentphases. Here we exploit a topotactic reduction reaction to provide a non-ultra-high vacuum(UHV) means of growing highly oriented single crystalline thin films of the easily overoxidizedhalf-metallic semiconductor europium monoxide (EuO) with a perfection rivallingthat of the best films of the same material grown by molecular-beam epitaxy or UHV pulsedlaserdeposition. As the technique only requires high-vacuum deposition equipment, it hasthe potential to drastically improve the accessibility of high-quality single crystalline films ofEuO as well as other difficult-to-synthesize compounds.
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)16
%9 Journal Article
%U <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000358858500022
%$ pmid:26177710
%R 10.1038/ncomms8716
%U https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/202798