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Abstract Interface engineering at complex oxide heterostructures enables a wide range of electronic functionalities critical for next‐generation devices. Here it is demonstrated that ultra‐low‐voltage electron beam lithography (ULV‐EBL) creates high‐quality mesoscale structures at LaAlO3/SrTiO3(LAO/STO) interfaces with greater efficiency than conventional methods. Nanowires, tunnel barriers, and electron waveguides are successfully patterned that exhibit distinctive transport characteristics including 1D superconductivity, nonlinear current–voltage behavior, and ballistic electron flow. While conductive atomic force microscopy (c‐AFM) previously enabled similar interface modifications, ULV‐EBL provides significantly faster patterning speeds (10 mm s−1vs 1 µm s−1), wafer‐scale capability (>(10 cm)2vs <(90 µm)2), and maintenance of pattern quality under vacuum conditions. Additionally, an efficient oxygen plasma treatment method is developed for pattern erasure and surface cleaning, which reveals novel surface reaction dynamics at oxide interfaces. These capabilities establish ULV‐EBL as a versatile approach for scalable interface engineering in complex oxide heterostructures, with potential applications in reconfigurable electronics, sensors, and oxide‐based devices.
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The Role of Oxygen Transfer in Oxide Heterostructures on Functional Properties
Abstract A variety of mechanisms are reported to play critical roles in contributing to the high carrier/electron mobility in oxide/SrTiO3(STO) heterostructures. By using La0.95Sr0.05TiO3(LSTO) epitaxially grown on different single crystal substrates (such as STO, GdScO3, LaAlO3, (LaAlO3)0.3(Sr2AlTaO6)0.7, and CeO2buffered STO) as the model systems, the formation of a conducting substrate surface layer (CSSL) on STO substrate is shown at relatively low growth temperature and high oxygen pressure (725 °C, 5 × 10–4 Torr), which contributes to the enhanced conductivity of the LSTO/STO heterostructures. Different from the conventional oxygen vacancy model, this work reveals that the formation of the CSSL occurs when growing an oxide layer (LSTO in this case) on STO, while neither annealing nor the growth of an Au layer alone at the exact same growth condition generates the CSSL in STO. It demonstrates that the oxide layer actively pulls oxygen from STO substrate at given growth conditions, leading to the formation of the CSSL. The observations emphasize the oxygen transfer across film/substrate interface during the synthesis of oxide heterostructures playing a critical role in functional properties.
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- PAR ID:
- 10446148
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advanced Materials Interfaces
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2196-7350
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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