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Cs-Corrected Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Investigation of Dislocation Core Configurations at a SrTiO3/MgO Heterogeneous Interface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2013

Yuanyuan Zhu ,
Chengyu Song ,
Andrew M. Minor  and
Haiyan Wang
Yuanyuan Zhu
Affiliation:
Program of Materials Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3128, USA
Chengyu Song
Affiliation:
National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Andrew M. Minor
Affiliation:
National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Haiyan Wang*
Affiliation:
Program of Materials Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3128, USA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 7843-3128, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: wangh@ece.tamu.edu
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Abstract

Heterostructures and interfacial defects in a 40-nm-thick SrTiO3 (STO) film grown epitaxially on a single-crystal MgO (001) were investigated using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy and geometric phase analysis. The interface of STO/MgO was found to be of the typical domain-matching epitaxy with a misfit dislocation network having a Burgers vector of ½ aSTO ⟨100⟩. Our studies also revealed that the misfit dislocation cores at the heterogeneous interface display various local cation arrangements in terms of the combination of the extra-half inserting plane and the initial film plane. The type of the inserting plane, either the SrO or the TiO2 plane, alters with actual interfacial conditions. Contrary to previous theoretical calculations, the starting film planes were found to be dominated by the SrO layer, i.e., a SrO/MgO interface. In certain regions, the starting film planes change to the TiO2/MgO interface because of atomic steps at the MgO substrate surface. In particular, four basic misfit dislocation core configurations of the STO/MgO system have been identified and discussed in relation to the substrate surface terraces and possible interdiffusion. The interface structure of the system in reverse—MgO/STO—is also studied and presented for comparison.

Keywords

aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (Cs-corrected STEM)geometric phase analysis (GPA)interface structuredislocation coreperovskitethin films
Type
Materials Applications
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 706 - 715
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 2013 

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