δ -Doping of oxygen vacancies dictated by thermodynamics in epitaxial SrTiO3 films

Abstract

Homoepitaxial SrTiO3(110) film is grown by molecular beam epitaxy in ultra-high vacuum with oxygen diffusing from substrate as the only oxidant. The resulted oxygen vacancies (VOs) are found to be spatially confined within few subsurface layers only, forming a quasi-two-dimensional doped region with a tunable high concentration. Such a δ-function distribution of VOs is essentially determined by the thermodynamics associated with the surface reconstruction, and facilitated by the relatively high growth temperature. Our results demonstrate that it is feasible to tune VOs distribution at the atomic scale by controlling the lattice structure of oxide surfaces.