Measurements of Surface Diffusivity and Coarsening During Pulsed Laser Deposition

Abstract

Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) of homoepitaxial SrTiO3 <001> was studied with in-situ x-ray specular reflectivity and surface diffuse x-ray scattering. Unlike prior reflectivity-based studies, these measurements access both the time- and the length-scales of the evolution of the surface morphology during growth. In particular, we show that this technique allows direct measurements of the diffusivity for both inter- and intra-layer transport. Our results explicitly limit the possible role of island break-up, demonstrate the key roles played by nucleation and coarsening in PLD, and place an upper bound on the Ehrlich-Schwoebel (ES) barrier for downhill diffusion.

References in corpus (2)

• Observed Effects of a Changing Step-Edge Density on Thin-Film Growth Dynamics
• X-ray scattering from surfaces: discrete and continuous components of roughness

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