title: Surface step terrace tuned microstructures and dielectric properties of highly epitaxial CaCu3Ti4O12thin films on vicinal LaAlO3substrates.
abstract: Controllable interfacial strain can manipulate the physical properties of epitaxial films and help understand the physical nature of the correlation between the properties and the atomic microstructures. By using a proper design of vicinal single-crystal substrate, the interface strain in epitaxial thin films can be well controlled by adjusting the miscut angle via a surface-step-terrace matching growth mode. Here, we demonstrate that LaAlO3(LAO) substrates with various miscut angles of 1.0°, 2.75°, and 5.0° were used to tune the dielectric properties of epitaxial CaCu3Ti4O12(CCTO) thin films. A model of coexistent compressive and tensile strained domains is proposed to understand the epitaxial nature. Our findings on the self-tuning of the compressive and tensile strained domain ratio along the interface depending on the miscut angle and the stress relaxation mechanism under this growth mode will open a new avenue to achieve CCTO films with high dielectric constant and low dielectric loss, which is critical for the design and integration of advanced heterostructures for high performance capacitance device applications.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Guang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yanda
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ji
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Weizheng
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Physics and Chemistry, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Shengliang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Physics and Chemistry, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, P. R. China.
authors.forename: You
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures &Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093 China.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Pang
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures &Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093 China.
authors.forename: Y B
authors.initials: YB
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Huizhong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Handong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Zhiming
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory Cultivation Base for Nonmetal Composites and Functional Materials, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang 621010, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Jingsong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas 78249, USA.|Department of Physics and the Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204, USA.
authors.forename: Chonglin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lin