Peng Zuo, a postdoc working in the MRSEC IRG 2, presented his group’s work on the system of PrAlO3/SrTiO3 created by solid phase epitaxy at the International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy (ICCGE-19) in Keystone CO, July 28-August 2, 2019.
In the work presented, a layer of g-Al2O3 was observed epitaxially grown at the interface in the as-deposited samples, and after thermally annealing the PrAlO3 films epitaxially crystallized on top of this interfacial layer. This work helps to get insight into the crystallization of our PrAlO3/SrTiO3 systems and inspires further work to improve the ALD precursors for the PrAlO3 film.
The presentation was part of the Symposium on Epitaxy of Complex Oxides: Understanding Film Growth and Solid-Phase Epitaxy, one of the parallel sessions held on Friday, August 2 at the conference.
“I was impressed by the number of speakers invited to the complex oxides epitaxy symposium to share their recent work. This gave me an opportunity not only to learn from these interesting works, but also to meet the community of researchers working with complex oxides,” said Zuo.
Zuo cited the example of a session on Freestanding Crystalline Oxide Membranes, which discussed how to create low-dimensional oxide materials given that Sr3Al2O6 was recently discovered to be soluble in water and to serve as a template for perovskite systems like LaAlO3/SrTiO3.
“Another interesting example is the functional oxide La-doped BaSnO3 epitaxially incorporated on top of (001) Si with an SrTiO3 buffer layer, which makes it possible to apply functional oxides in the semiconductor industry,” said Zuo.
Zuo attended this conference with the assistance of a MRSEC Honored Scholar Travel Award grant that helped offset registration and travel costs for the trip.
“I would like to acknowledge our Wisconsin MRSEC for awarding me the Honored Scholar Travel Award. This gave me the opportunity to communicate our progress in this area and to learn from peers in similar fields around the world,” said Zuo.
According to the conference’s website, ICCGE-19 is the latest in a sequence that started with ICCG-1 in Boston, MA, in 1966, which marked the formation of the crystal growth community as an independent discipline rather than subsidiary to a number of other fields. The key principle is that the theory and practice of crystal growth is common across a range of materials and applications and that people in the field have much to share with one another.