Ultrathin epitaxially grown bismuth (111) membranes

Abstract

Characterization of hydrogen etched 6H-SiC(0001) substrates and subsequently grown AlN filmsEpitaxial silicon grown on CeO 2 /Si(111) structure by molecular beam epitaxy

Transient anisotropy in the electron diffraction of femtosecond laser-excited bismuth

“…Free-standing films of 15 nm thickness were produced by growing bismuth on a sodium chloride substrate, lifting the material off by dissolving the substrate in water, and finally depositing the films on a metallic support grid [11] with 100 µm × 100 µm square openings. Laser pulses of approximately 50 fs duration at 800 nm (spectral width 28 nm) from a 1 kHz chirped pulse amplified titanium sapphire laser were used for the excitation of the films.…”

“…Epitaxially grown bismuth films on (001)-oriented substrates often exhibit a characteristic microstructure, which consists of micron-sized 90 • rotated and twinned crystallites [10,11]. Accordingly, the actual diffraction pattern from bismuth films is a superposition of the diffraction intensity from the different crystallites (domains) and is therefore expected to exhibit a twelvefold symmetry.…”

Femtosecond electron diffraction: Preparation and characterization of (110)-oriented bismuth films

“…13 Bi usually crystallizes in the (111) orientation on a variety of substrates such as silicon, sapphire, etc. 14,15 In this study we were able to prepare (110)-highly oriented Bi films by heteroepitaxially growing Bi on the (100) surface of freshly cleaved potassium chloride (KCl) crystals. The quality and orientation of the Bi film strongly depend on the quality of the underlying substrate.…”

Controlling the growth of Bi(110) and Bi(111) films on an insulating substrate

“…This choice of substrate is also very beneficial for practical applications, as the interface between film and insulating substrate, expected to reveal topological states, will also be protected from influencing oxidation effects arising from ambient exposure in technological applications [19]. The growth of Bi has been extensively studied on Si(111) [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] and HOPG [13,[30][31][32] as well as other surfaces [3,4,12,[33][34][35][36][37][38], resulting in fabrication of films with a range of different morphologies, orientations, and strain. The fabrication of Bi films has attracted considerable interest in recent years, as their controlled growth, with focus on morphology and crystallographic orientation, on semiconductor and oxide surfaces is not a trivial task.…”