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G. Franceschi, M. Wagner, J. Hofinger, T. Krajňák, M. Schmid, U. Diebold, M. Riva:
"Growth of In₂O₃(111) thin films with optimized surfaces";
Physical Review Materials, 3 (2019), 10340301 - 10340310.

Indium oxide is widely employed in applications ranging from optoelectronics and gas sensing to catalysis, aswell as in thin-film heterostructures. To probe the fundamentals of phenomena at the heart of In2O3-based devicesthat are tied to the intrinsic surface and interface properties of the material, well-defined single-crystalline In2O3surfaces are needed. We report on how to grow atomically flat In2O3(111) thin films on yttria-stabilized zirconiasubstrates by pulsed laser deposition. The films are largely relaxed and reproduce the atomic-scale details of thesurfaces of single crystals, except for line defects originating from the antiphase domain boundaries that formbecause of the one-on-four lattice match between the surface unit cells of In2O3(111) and of the substrate. Whileoptimizing the growth conditions, we observe that the morphology of the films is ruled by the oxygen chemicalpotential, which determines the nature and diffusivity of adspecies during growth.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.3.103403