X-ray interference effects on the determination of structural data in ultrathin La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 epitaxial thin films

TL;DR

This paper investigates how X-ray interference effects influence the accuracy of structural data extraction in ultrathin La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 films, emphasizing the importance of considering phase differences for reliable measurements.

Contribution

It highlights the necessity of accounting for phase differences in X-ray diffraction analysis of ultrathin films with high substrate similarity.

Findings

Interference effects significantly impact diffraction data interpretation.

Explicit phase consideration improves accuracy of structural parameters.

Implications for strain analysis in ultrathin films and interfaces.

Abstract

We analyze X-ray diffraction data used to extract cell parameters of ultrathin films on closely matching substrates. We focus on epitaxial La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 films grown on (001) SrTiO3 single crystalline substrates. It will be shown that, due to extremely high structural similarity of film and substrate, data analysis must explicitly consider the distinct phase of the diffracted waves by substrate and films to extract reliable unit cell parameters. The implications of this finding for the understanding of strain effects in ultrathin films and interfaces will be underlined