Microstructures of LaNiO3 films grown on Si(001) by pulsed laser deposition

Conductive LaNiO3 (LNO) thin films were prepared on Si(000 by pulsed laser deposition and their microstructures were investigated using synchrotron X-ray scattering and atomic force microscopy. We observed that the surface morphology of the LNO thin films was extremely smooth with typically a 1.0-nm root-mean-squared roughness for films up to 360 nm in thickness and the film strain increased monotonically with the film thickness, suggesting that the LNO/Si(001) films be grown with a layer-like growth mode. Grown with the (001) preferred orientation, the LNO films showed a significant anisotropic structural order; the coherence length of the out-of-plane stacking order was one order of magnitude larger than that of the in-plane atomic order. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.