Surfaces of cubic perovskite oxides attract significant attention for their physical tunability and high potential for technical applications. Bulk-terminated surfaces are desirable for theoretical modelling and experimental reproducibility, yet there is a lack of methods for preparing such well-defined surfaces. We discuss a method for strain-assisted cleaving of perovskite single crystals, using a setup easily transferable between different experimental systems. The details of the cleaving device and the procedure were optimized in a systematic study on the model SrTiO3. The large-area morphology and typical distribution of surface terminations on cleaved SrTiO3(001) is presented, with specific guidelines on how to distinguish well-cleaved surfaces from conchoidally fractured ones. The cleaving is applicable to other cubic perovskites, as demonstrated on KTaO3(001) and BaTiO3(001). This approach opens up a pathway for obtaining high-quality surfaces of this promising class of materials.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.08996,
title = {How to cleave cubic perovskite oxides},
author = {Igor Sokolović and Michael Schmid and Ulrike Diebold and Martin Setvín},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.08996},
year = {2024}
}