Epitaxial LaFeAsOF thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition

TL;DR

This paper reports the successful growth of high-quality epitaxial LaFeAsOF superconducting thin films using pulsed laser deposition, demonstrating promising superconducting properties and high critical fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fabrication method for epitaxial LaFeAsOF thin films with high crystalline quality and superconducting performance.

Findings

Achieved epitaxial LaFeAsOF thin films with 1° FWHM

Superconducting transition temperature (Tc90) of 25K

High upper critical field of 76.2 T

Abstract

Superconducting and epitaxially grown LaFeAsOF thin films were successfully prepared on (001)-oriented LaAlO3 substrates using pulsed laser deposition. The prepared thin films show exclusively a single in-plane orientation with epitaxial relation (001)[100] parallel to (001)[100] and a FWHM value of 1deg. Furthermore, resistive measurement of the superconducting transition temperature revealed a Tc90 of 25K with a high residual resistive ratio of 6.8. The applied preparation technique, standard thin film pulsed laser deposition at room temperature in combination with a subsequent post annealing process, is suitable for fabrication of high quality LaFeAsO1-xFx thin films. A high upper critical field of 76.2 T was evaluated for magnetic fields applied perpendicular to the c-axis and the anisotropy was calculated to be 3.3 assuming single band superconductivity.