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Hybrid oxide molecular beam epitaxy (hMBE), a thin-film deposition technique in which transition metal cations are delivered using a metal-organic precursor, has emerged as the state-of-the-art approach to the synthesis of electronic-grade complex oxide films with a stoichiometric growth window. However, numerous questions remain regarding the chemical mechanisms of the growth process and the surface properties of the resulting films. To examine these properties, thin film SrTiO3 (STO) was prepared by hMBE using a titanium tetraisopropoxide (TTIP) precursor for Ti delivery and an elemental Sr source on annealed STO and Nb-doped STO substrates with varying TTIP:Sr flux ratios to examine the conditions for the reported stoichiometric growth window. The grown films were transferred to an appended x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) system under ultrahigh vacuum to study the surface elemental composition in the STO samples. Low energy electron diffraction and microscopy (LEED/LEEM) measurements were also performed to correlate the XPS data with the surface termination. Also, samples were examined using x-ray diffraction (XRD) in order to compare our surface sensitive results with previously reported measurements of the bulk of the films in the literature. We find that a surface exhibiting a mixture of SrO and TiO2 termination, or a full SrO termination is necessary to obtain stoichiometric adsorption-controlled step-flow growth. These results indicate that surface Sr is necessary to maintain chemical equilibrium These results can open new opportunities for the study of interfacial structures synthesized via hMBE.

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