Search for: All records

Mixtures of Ce‐doped rare‐earth aluminum perovskites are drawing a significant amount of attention as potential scintillating devices. However, the synthesis of complex perovskite systems leads to many challenges. Designing the A‐site cations with an equiatomic ratio allows for the stabilization of a single‐crystal phase driven by an entropic regime. This work describes the synthesis of a highly epitaxial thin film of configurationally disordered rare‐earth aluminum perovskite oxide (La_0.2Lu_0.2Y_0.2Gd_0.2Ce_0.2)AlO₃and characterizes the structural and optical properties. The thin films exhibit three equivalent epitaxial domains having an orthorhombic structure resulting from monoclinic distortion of the perovskite cubic cell. An excitation of 286.5 nm from Gd³⁺and energy transfer to Ce³⁺with 405 nm emission are observed, which represents the potential for high‐energy conversion. These experimental results also offer the pathway to tunable optical properties of high‐entropy rare‐earth epitaxial perovskite films for a range of applications.

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 La_0.95Sr_0.05TiO₃(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.

Actinide materials have various applications that range from nuclear energy to quantum computing. Most current efforts have focused on bulk actinide materials. Tuning functional properties by using strain engineering in epitaxial thin films is largely lacking. Using uranium dioxide (UO₂) as a model system, in this work, the authors explore strain engineering in actinide epitaxial thin films and investigate the origin of induced ferromagnetism in an antiferromagnet UO₂. It is found that UO_2+xthin films are hypostoichiometric (x<0) with in‐plane tensile strain, while they are hyperstoichiometric (x>0) with in‐plane compressive strain. Different from strain engineering in non‐actinide oxide thin films, the epitaxial strain in UO₂is accommodated by point defects such as vacancies and interstitials due to the low formation energy. Both epitaxial strain and strain relaxation induced point defects such as oxygen/uranium vacancies and oxygen/uranium interstitials can distort magnetic structure and result in magnetic moments. This work reveals the correlation among strain, point defects and ferromagnetism in strain engineered UO_2+xthin films and the results offer new opportunities to understand the influence of coupled order parameters on the emergent properties of many other actinide thin films.