Laser testing parameters: 10 Hz, 0.

93 Watts
20 pulses / nm ~ 6 pulses/unit cell (machine possibly glitches at 10 Hz two
beams at once)
So for 50 nm, want 1000 pulses: At 5 Hz, 200 seconds, or 3 min 20 seconds.
At 10 Hz, 100 seconds, or 1 min 40 seconds.
Growth Conditions: 650 C, 150 mbar O 2, 8.5 cm working distance

Paper Details (a-axis):

Conversion Units: 1 Pa = 0.00750062 Torr
Only two known electron doped cuprates: T phase and infinite-layer phase
compounds (of which SLCO is one member).
They used the ideal x = 0.1 SLCO, deposited on STO at a growth temperature of
650 C. The sputtering gas was a mixture of Ar + 10% O2, with total pressure fixed
at 5 Pa (0.0375 Torr = 37.5 mTorr). Note that you can in theory calculate the
pressure of oxygen using ideal gas law (use volume of chamber), assuming noninteracting gases.
Thicknesses of SLCO films were 40 nm, and the growth rate was 1.2 nm/min
(assuming 1 angstrom per pulse, you want 12/60 = 0.2 A/s = 0.2 Hz laser??).
After deposition, reduction annealing was performed in 40-120 Pa of Ar + 5% H 2 at
Ta 500 C for 10-30 minutes to remove excess apical oxygen but note that at the
same time you dont want to introduce oxygen vacancies in the CuO 2 planes!
Lattice strain is important because it makes the removal of interstitial apical
oxygen atoms easier (see reference 7 in the paper). But c-axis growth was only
stable for up to -2.1% lattice mismatch, from FWHM XRD peak on LSAT. STO (if
remembered correctly) has the largest lattice parameter so it should be okay.
It turns out that for c-axis growth, post-deposition annealing in H 2 was able to
remove the apical oxygens, and thereby lower the c-axis lattice parameter,
without removing the planar oxygens (which would have introduced a long-c
superlattice phase it seems smaller a implies longer c for the unit cell to fit
everything in). It was more difficult to do the same for a-axis SLCO, so they had to
introduce additional measures those being lower growth temperatures and postdeposition oxygen annealing.
**From SLCO Markert paper (2003), they suggest that providing a small tensile
stress to the thin films stretches the Cu-O bonds and makes them amenable to
electron doping, which relieves the tension. They argued, based on empirical
findings, that epitaxial compressive stress actually inhibits electron doping and

that therefore SLCO on STO (2% compressive strain) has not been extensively
studied.
Put another way, from Karimoto and Naitos latest paper (growth of SLCO on DSO
substrates), electron doping stretches the Cu-O bond, thereby increasing the inplane lattice parameter to 3.949 Angstorms for SLCO with x = 0.1. Thus they
suggest that it is reasonable that larger substrates should be used.
But also, Karimoto and Naito (who grew SLCO on KTO and found Tc values at 40 K,
nearly identical to bulk values) empirically found that reduction annealing was
crucial to superconductivity as well, since apex (or apical) oxygen atoms were
harmful for superconductivity in T phases, and they believed that the same would
be true for the IL phase compounds.
It may of course be possible that for a 50 nm film, the initial compressive strain
may only persist for the first 20 nm or so, until SLCO reaches its normal Cu-O
bond length (need to clarify).