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Facile Chemical Route to Prepare Water Soluble Epitaxial Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 Sacrificial Layers for Free‐Standing Oxides
Author(s) -
Salles Pol,
Caño Ivan,
Guzman Roger,
Dore Camilla,
Mihi Agustín,
Zhou Wu,
Coll Mariona
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
advanced materials interfaces
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.671
H-Index - 65
ISSN - 2196-7350
DOI - 10.1002/admi.202001643
Subject(s) - materials science , epitaxy , heterojunction , thin film , nanotechnology , substrate (aquarium) , oxide , chemical engineering , layer (electronics) , optoelectronics , metallurgy , oceanography , geology , engineering
The growth of epitaxial complex oxides has been essentially limited to specific substrates that can induce epitaxial growth and stand high temperature thermal treatments. These restrictions hinder the opportunity to manipulate and integrate such materials into new artificial heterostructures including the use of polymeric and silicon substrates and study emergent phenomena for novel applications. To tackle this bottleneck, herein, a facile chemical route to prepare water‐soluble epitaxial Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 thin films to be used as sacrificial layer for future free‐standing epitaxial complex oxide manipulation is described. Two solution processes are put forward based on metal nitrate and metalorganic precursors to prepare dense, homogeneous and epitaxial Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 thin films that can be easily etched by milli‐Q water. Moreover, as a proof of concept, a basic heterostructure consisting of Al 2 O 3 /Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 on SrTiO 3 is fabricated to subsequently exfoliate the Al 2 O 3 thin film and transfer it to a polymer substrate. This is a robust chemical and low‐cost methodology that could be adopted to prepare a wide variety of thin films to fabricate artificial heterostructures to go beyond the traditional electronic, spintronic, and energy storage and conversion devices.