Thermal Laser Epitaxy of elements from across the periodic table

Thermal Laser Epitaxy (TLE) is a particularly promising new technique for the growth of complex oxides and heterostructures. [1] At its heart, TLE uses lasers to generate vapors from individual elemental sources. The use of lasers for epitaxial growth provides near arbitrary power densities, a lack of source contamination and increased efficiency due to the source being directly illuminated by the laser.

Within this work, we propose and demonstrate that thermal laser evaporation can be applied to all solid, nonradioactive elements in the periodic table. [2] By depositing thin films, we achieve growth rates exceeding 1 Å/s with output laser powers less than 500 W using identical beam parameters for many different elements.

The source temperature is found to vary linearly with the laser power within the examined power range, resulting in a clear Arrhenius relation between incident laser power and deposition rate.[2] This allows for TLE to be effectively scaled for industrial applications requiring high deposition rates.[3] High growth rates are possible using free-standing sources for most of the elements tested, eliminating the need for crucibles.