Membranes

Doped BaSnO₃ is a wide band-gap semiconductor that is known to exhibit high electron mobility at room temperature, showing great prospects as an alternative transparent conducting oxide to the industry standard indium-tin-oxide. Flexible transparent conducting oxides are of special interest for future photonics and optoelectronic devices but realizing high-quality films as flexible materials has been a challenge. In this work, we will discuss our efforts to synthesize and characterize freestanding membranes of La-doped BaSnO₃ (BLSO) films. The films were deposited using pulsed laser deposition on a hygroscopic pseudo-perovskite buffer layer, which acts as a sacrificial layer that can be selectively etched to produce membranes¹. Using this technique, we can transfer complex oxides and heterostructures onto flexible substrates. We find that the electron mobility of the freestanding BLSO films is comparable to the as grown films, paving the way for the exploration of the strain-dependent BLSO transport properties for potential flexible electronics applications.

¹D. Lu et al., Nat. Mater. 15, 1255-1260 (2016).