Two dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at a oxide heterostructures are attracting considerable attention, as these might substitute conventional semiconductors for novel electronic devices [1]. Here we present a minimal set-up for such a 2DEG -the SrTiO3(110)-(4 x 1) surface, natively terminated with one monolayer of chemically-inert titania. Oxygen vacancies induced by synchrotron radiation migrate under- neath this overlayer, this leads to a confining potential and electron doping such that a 2DEG develops. Our angular resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and theoretical results show that confinement along (110) is strikingly different from a (001) crystal orientation. In particular the quantized subbands show a surprising "semi-heavy" band, in contrast to the analogue in the bulk, and a high electronic anisotropy. This anisotropy and even the effective mass of the (110) 2DEG is tunable by doping, offering a high flexibility to engineer the properties of this system.
@article{arxiv.1309.7042,
title = {Anisotropic two-dimensional electron gas at SrTiO3(110) protected by its native overlayer},
author = {Zhiming Wang and Zhicheng Zhong and Xianfeng Hao and Stefan Gerhold and Bernhard Stoger and Michael Schmid and Jaime Sanchez-Barriga and Andrei Varykhalov and Cesare Franchini and Karsten Held and Ulrike Diebold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.7042},
year = {2014}
}