NiO thin film with an extremely high index (7 1 4) on r-plane sapphire substrate

Thin film epitaxy is essential for state-of-the-art semiconductor applications. The combination of different substrates and deposition methods leads to various crystallographic orientation relationships between thin films and substrates, which have a decisive impact on thin film performance. By utilizing pulsed laser deposition, we discovered a very high-index (7 1 4) –oriented NiO thin film when deposited on r-plane (1012) sapphire substrates. The in-plane epitaxial relations are [131 ]_NiO||[1210]_Sapphire and [1 12]_NiO||[1011]_Sapphire , and the lattice mismatch is 3.2