Achievement

IGERT Fellow Shaobo Zhu and his collaborators have integrated a thin film of the perovskite SrTiO3 with SiC. Epitaxial (111)-oriented SrTiO3 thin films were grown on (0001) 6H-SiC by reactive molecular beam epitaxy. Since SrTiO3 is a common substrate for many oxide perovskites, its growth on SiC provides a pathway for the integration of functional oxides (e.g., ferromagnets, ferroelectrics) with the wide-bandgap semiconductor SiC. Transmission electron microscopy was used to characterize both the film structure as well as the interface, and it was shown that the interface was atomically sharp with no transitional phases between the SiC and SrTiO3. The film was also shown to be twinned in-plane by 180 degrees. This result suggests that SrTiO3 will also be easily integrated with the other hexagonal polytypes of SiC.