Letter abstract
Nature Materials 4, 593 - 596 (2005)
Published online: 10 July 2005 | doi:10.1038/nmat1402
Subject Categories: Electronic materials | Nanoscale materials | Design synthesis and processing
Highly conductive nanolayers on strontium titanate produced by preferential ion-beam etching
David W. Reagor1 & Vladimir Y. Butko2
Developing fabrication methods for electronically active nanostructures is an important challenge of modern science and technology. Fabrication efforts1, 2, 3, 4 for crystalline materials have been focused on state-of-the-art epitaxial growth techniques. These techniques are based on deposition of precisely controlled combinations of various materials on a heated substrate. We report a method that does not require deposition and transforms a nanoscale layer of a complex crystalline compound into a new material using low-energy ion-beam preferential etching (IBPE). We demonstrate this method by transforming a widely used5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 insulator model system, SrTiO3, into a transparent conductor. Most significantly, the resistivity decreases with decreasing temperature as 
T2.5
0.3 and eventually falls below that of room-temperature copper. These transport measurements imply a crystal quality in the conduction channel comparable to that obtained1 with the highest-quality growth techniques. The universality of low-energy IBPE implies wide potential applicability to fabrication of other nanolayers.
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
- Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
Correspondence to: David W. Reagor1 e-mail: reagor@lanl.gov
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