The Controlled Synthesis of Metastable Oxides Utilizing Epitaxy and Epitaxial Stabilization

The research enabled by this DOE grant led to 13 publications in leading refereed journals including Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters as well as feature articles in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and Physik Journal (the German equivalent of Physics Today distributed to all members of the German Physical Society) on the controlled synthesis of metastable oxides utilizing epitaxy and epitaxial stabilization. In total our results fill over 100 pages of archived journals and are attached

REScO3 Substrates—Purveyors of Strain Engineering

The thermodynamic and crystallographic background for the development of substrate crystals that are suitable for the epitaxial deposition of biaxially strained functional perovskite layers is reviewed. In such strained layers the elastic energy delivers an additional contribution to the Gibbs free energy, which allows the tuning of physical properties and phase transition temperatures to desired values. For some oxide systems metastable phases can even be accessed. Rare-earth scandates, REScO3, are well suited as substrate crystals because they combine mechanical and chemical stability in the epitaxy process with an adjustable range of pseudo-cubic lattice parameters in the 3.95 to 4.02 Å range. To further tune the lattice parameters, chemical substitution for the RE or Sc is possible. © 2019 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinhei

Doping evolution and polar surface reconstruction of the infinite-layer cuprate Sr1−x_{1-x}Lax_{x}CuO2_{2}

We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to study the doping evolution of infinite-layer Sr$_{1-x}$La$_{x}$CuO$_{2}$ thin films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. At low doping, the material exhibits a dispersive lower Hubbard band typical of the superconducting cuprate parent compounds. As carriers are added to the system, a continuous evolution from charge-transfer insulator to superconductor is observed, with the initial lower Hubbard band pinned well below the Fermi level and the development of a coherent low-energy band with electron doping. This two-component spectral function emphasizes the important role that strong local correlations play even at relatively high doping levels. Electron diffraction probes reveal a ${p(2\times2)}$ surface reconstruction of the material at low doping levels. Using a number of simple assumptions, we develop a model of this reconstruction based on the polar nature of the infinite-layer structure. Finally, we provide evidence for a thickness-controlled transition in ultrathin films of SrCuO$_2$ grown on nonpolar SrTiO$_3$, highlighting the diverse structural changes that can occur in polar complex oxide thin films