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The cubic perovskite SrMoO3 with a paramagnetic ground state and remarkably low room-temperature resistivity has been considered as a suitable candidate for the new-era oxide-based technology. However, the difficulty of preparing single-phase SrMoO3 thin films by hydrogen-free sputtering has hindered their practical use, especially due to the formation of thermodynamically favorable SrMoO4 impurity. In this work, we developed a radio frequency sputtering technology enabling the reduction reaction and achieved conductive epitaxial SrMoO3 films with pure phase from a SrMoO4 target in a hydrogen-free, pure argon environment. We demonstrated the significance of controlling the target-to-substrate distance (TSD) on the synthesis of SrMoO3; the film resistivity drastically changes from 1.46 × 105 μΩ·cm to 250 μΩ·cm by adjusting the TSD. Cross-sectional microstructural analyses demonstrated that films with the lowest resistivity, deposited for TSD = 2.5 cm, possess a single-phase SrMoO3 with an epitaxial perovskite structure. The formation mechanism of the conductive single-phase SrMoO3 films can be attributed to the plasma-assisted growth process by tuning the TSD. Temperature-dependent resistivity and Hall effect studies revealed metal-like conducting properties for low-resistive SrMoO3 films while the high-resistive ones displayed semiconductor-like behavior. Our approach makes hydrogen-free, reliable and cost-efficient scalable deposition of SrMoO3 films possible, which may open up promising prospects for a wide range of future applications of oxide materials.

Rights:

• Creative Commons BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
  

Keyword: plasma-assisted RF sputtering technology, reduction reaction, single-phase conductive SrMoO3 epitaxial films

Date published: 2024-12-31

Publisher: Informa UK Limited

Journal:

• Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (ISSN: 14686996) vol. 25 issue. 1

Funding:

• JST CREST JPMJCR19J4

Manuscript type: Publisher's version (Version of record)

MDR DOI:

First published URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/14686996.2024.2378684

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Updated at: 2024-09-11 08:30:16 +0900

Published on MDR: 2024-09-11 08:30:16 +0900