Eur. Phys. J. B 46, 251-255 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2005-00248-6

Synchrotron X-ray diffraction study of SrRuO₃/SrTiO₃/SrRuO₃ nano-sized heterostructures grown by laser MBE

¹ Coherentia CNR-INFM and Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Università di Roma “TorVergata”, via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Roma, Italy
² ESRF, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, B.P. 220, 38043 Grenoble Cedex, France

Corresponding author: ^a carmela.aruta@uniroma2.it

Received: 10 January 2005
Revised: 30 May 2005
Published online: 11 August 2005

Abstract

Structural investigation using X-ray synchrotron radiation has been performed on SrRuO₃/SrTiO₃/SrRuO₃ epitaxial heterostructures, with each constituent layer a few unit cell thick grown on (001) SrTiO₃ substrate. Detailed information on the evolution of the in-plane lattice structure has been obtained, in these heterostructures, by grazing incidence diffraction measurements. The samples have been grown by low-pressure pulsed laser deposition. Under our deposition conditions, SrRuO₃ layers grow with an elongated cell perpendicular to the substrate surface. The in-plane pseudocubic lattice parameters do not match the in-plane square SrTiO₃ structure even in the case of very thin SrRuO₃ layers. Such a distortion was found to decrease with increasing the thickness of the SrTiO₃ barrier layer.