TY - JOUR
AU - Mairoser, Thomas
AU - Mundy, Julia A.
AU - Melville, Alexander
AU - Hodash, Daniel
AU - Cueva, Paul
AU - Held, Rainer
AU - Glavic, Artur
AU - Schubert, Jürgen
AU - Muller, David A.
AU - Schlom, Darrell G.
AU - Schmehl, Andreas
TI - High-quality EuO thin films the easy way via topotactic transformation
JO - Nature Communications
VL - 6
SN - 2041-1723
CY - London
PB - Nature Publishing Group
M1 - FZJ-2015-04967
SP - 7716 -
PY - 2015
AB - 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.
LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000358858500022
C6 - pmid:26177710
DO - DOI:10.1038/ncomms8716
UR - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/202798
ER -