Dr. Felix V. E. Hensling

Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research
Stuttgart

The growth of impossible oxides

Their broad range of unusual and unique properties have gained oxides enormous attention for
both application-driven and fundamental solid-state research. The ability to produce high-quality
epitaxial films is often crucial for this. Oxide epitaxy poses numerous challenges, the main ones
being (1) the difficulty to find a universal, versatile, and clean way to transfer an element from a
source onto a substrate, and (2) the ability to control the phase formation in a growing film. For
oxides, this is an especially relevant topic. The high oxidization potentials needed to achieve
many desired compounds are even more difficult to achieve for the high temperatures required
for numerous oxide phases to form. This means that by traditional epitaxy techniques many
oxide phases of interest are impossible to achieve. I will present in this talk, how I utilize the
novel thin film growth technique Thermal Laser Epitaxy (TLE) to extend the parameter space
available for oxide epitaxy. To this end, I will present the epitaxial growth of three oxides: c-
plane sapphire, TaO2 , and RhO2 . All three material system were previously considered
impossible to grow as high quality epitaxial films due to the before listed process parameter
constraints.
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