Epitaxial growth manner and structure of superconducting oxide films

The high quality thin films of high-Tc superconducting oxide are necessary for elucidating the superconducting mechanism and for device application. The recent trend in the preparation of high-Tc films has been toward “in-situ” growth of the superconducting phase at relatively low temperatures. The purpose of “in-situ” growth is to attain surface smoothness suitable for fabricating film devices but also to obtain high quality film. We present the investigation on the initial growth manner of YBCO by in-situ reflective high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) technique and on the structural and superconducting properties of the resulting ultrathin films below 100Å. The epitaxial films have been grown on (100) plane of MgO and SrTiO, heated below 650°C by activated reactive evaporation. The in-situ RHEED observation and the intensity measurement was carried out during deposition of YBCO on the substrate at 650°C. The deposition rate was 0.8Å/s. Fig. 1 shows the RHEED patterns at every stage of deposition of YBCO on MgO(100). All the patterns exhibit the sharp streaks, indicating that the film surface is atomically smooth and the growth manner is layer-by-layer.