Study of Nb epitaxial growth on Cu(111) at sub-monolayer level

C Clavero and NP Guisinger and SG Srinivasan and RA Lukaszew, JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS, 112, 074328 (2012).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4759119

The epitaxial growth of Nb on Cu(111) is experimentally and theoretically investigated at submonolayer level since the early stages of growth for this system remain unexplored despite its interest in superconducting thin film applications. The growth conditions were optimized to obtain crystalline nanoisland ordering on the first subatomic layer. Interestingly, we observe that Nb atoms arrange forming a hexagonal lattice on Cu(111) in contrast with the expected tetragonal pseudomorphic growth observed in other systems such as Nb on Pd (111). The correlation between annealing temperature and Cu-Nb intermixing was experimentally and theoretically investigated. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4759119

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