Van der Waals epitaxy of pulsed laser deposited antimony thin films on lattice-matched and amorphous substrates

Monatomic antimony thin films have recently attracted attention for applications in phase change memory, nanophotonics, and two-dimensional materials. Although some promising results have been reported, the true potential of Sb thin films is still hindered by the scalability issue and the lack of reliable bottom-up production. Here we demonstrate the growth of Sb thin films on a lattice-matching and amorphous substrates using pulsed laser deposition. C-axis out-of-plane textured Sb thin films were successfully deposited on Sb2Te3 and SiO2/Si3N4 substrates. In the case of growth on Sb2Te3, we show that an intermediate phase is formed at the Sb2Te3-Sb interface playing a crucial role in forming a solid coupling and thus maintaining epitaxy leading to the production of high-quality Sb thin films. A 3-4 nm amorphous Sb seed layer was used to induce texture and suitable surface termination for the growth of Sb thin films on amorphous substrates. The deposition parameters were fine-tuned, and the growth was monitored in situ by refiection high energy electron diffraction. Scanning/transmission electron micro-scopy unveiled the local structure of produced films showing the formation of b-phase Sb thin films. Our results demonstrate the feasibility to produce very smooth high-quality antimony thin films with uni-form coverage, from few layers to large thicknesses, using pulsed laser deposition. We believe the results of our work on scalable and controllable Sb growth have the potential to open up research on phase change materials and optoelectronics research.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

In this study, the growth of monatomic antimony thin films using pulsed laser deposition on lattice-matching and amorphous substrates was demonstrated. The results showed that the method can produce smooth and high-quality antimony thin films with uniform coverage, which have potential for research in phase change memory and nanophotonics.