Epitaxial and layer-by-layer growth of EuO thin films on yttria-stabilized cubic zirconia (001) using MBE distillation

Abstract

We have succeeded in growing epitaxial and highly stoichiometric films of EuO on yttria-stabilized cubic zirconia (YSZ) (001). The use of the Eu-distillation process during the molecular beam epitaxy assisted growth enables the consistent achievement of stoichiometry. We have also succeeded in growing the films in a layer-by-layer fashion by fine tuning the Eu vs. oxygen deposition rates. The initial stages of growth involve the limited supply of oxygen from the YSZ substrate, but the EuO stoichiometry can still be well maintained. The films grown were sufficiently smooth so that the capping with a thin layer of aluminum was leak tight and enabled ex situ experiments free from trivalent Eu species. The findings were used to obtain recipes for better epitaxial growth of EuO on MgO (001).

10 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Epitaxial influence on the ferromagnetic semiconducotor EuO
• Soft x-ray magnetic circular dichroism study on Gd-doped EuO thin films

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• SmO thin films: a flexible route to correlated flat bands with nontrivial topology
• TiO2 as an electrostatic template for epitaxial growth of EuO on MgO(001) by reactive molecular beam epitaxy
• NO-assisted molecular-beam epitaxial growth of nitrogen substituted EuO