A facile route for producing single-crystalline epitaxial perovskite oxide thin films

We report how a low vacuum pressure process followed by a few-minute annealing enables epitaxial stabilization, producing high-quality, phase-pure, single-crystalline epitaxial, and misfit dislocation-free BiFeO3(001) thin films on SrTiO3(001) at ∼450 °C less than current routes. These results unambiguously challenge the widely held notion that atomic layer deposition (ALD) is not appropriate for attaining high-quality chemically complex oxide films on perovskite substrates in single-crystalline epitaxial form, demonstrating applicability as an inexpensive, facile, and highly scalable route.