Pulsed laser deposition with simultaneous in situ real-time monitoring of optical spectroscopic ellipsometry and reflection high-energy electron diffraction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pulsed laser deposition system that simultaneously uses in situ optical spectroscopic ellipsometry and RHEED to monitor thin-film growth, enabling real-time analysis of thickness and optical properties.

Contribution

The system combines RHEED and SE for real-time, in situ monitoring of thin-film growth, providing detailed electronic and structural information during deposition.

Findings

Real-time thickness and dielectric functions of thin films can be effectively extracted.

Simultaneous SE and RHEED monitoring offers insights into growth mechanisms.

Demonstrated with LaMnO3+δ thin-films on SrTiO3 substrates.

Abstract

We present a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) system that can monitor growth by simultaneously using in situ optical spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) and reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED). The RHEED precisely monitors the number of thin-film layers and surface structure during the deposition and the SE measures the optical spectra of the samples simultaneously. The thin-film thickness information obtained from RHEED facilitates the SE modeling process, which allows extracting the in situ optical spectra, i.e. the dielectric functions, of thin-films during growth. The in situ dielectric functions contain indispensable information about the electronic structure of thin-films. We demonstrate the performance of this system by growing LaMnO3+{\delta} (LMO) thin-films on SrTiO3 (001) substrates. By using in situ SE and RHEED simultaneously, we show that real-time thickness and dielectric functions of the LMO thin-films can be effectively extracted. The simultaneous monitoring of both optical SE and RHEED offers important clues to understand the growth mechanism of atomic-scale thin-films.