Growth of SrTiO3(110) film with oxide molecule beam epitaxy

In the past decade, a tremendous amount of evidence has shown that thin films, superlattices and heterointerfaces of oxides display a rich diversity of glamorous properties that is related, but not identical to that in the bulk. To understand the underlying physical mechanism, it is essential to construct the oxide heterostructures under control with atomic precision. We have studied the SrTiO$_{3}$(110) surface that bears intrinsic instability of reconstruction in addition to the broken symmetry due to the surface polarity, which provides us an additional degree to tune the properties of the epitaxial material by manipulating the termination layer of the substrate. Beyond the termination, we are able to tune the stability of a series of surface reconstructions and realize the reversible phase transitions between them. By applying the knowledge to the homoepitaxy, we develop an easy method to coordinate the metal evaporation sources with required flux rate ratio precisely during the oxide MBE growth. We further simplify the growth by controlling the shutter of the Sr source. The atomically well defined grown surface is characterized by scanning tunneling microscopy.