BACUO2 SRCUO2 SUPERLATTICES BY PULSED-LASER DEPOSITION - GROWTH AND STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION/

We have shown that the pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) technique can be successfully used to grow artificial superlattices based on the infini te-layer compounds BaCuO2 and SrCuO2. We have demonstrated, by a kinem atic analysis of the X-ray diffraction spectra, that the random discre te thickness fluctuations affect both the BaCuO2 and the SrCuO2 layers approximately in the same way. Furthermore, such kind of interfacial disorder resulted to be surprisingly low for this system. Such feature is confirmed by the appearance of sharp superstructure peaks even for the (BaCuO2)(2)/(SrCuO2)(1) superlattice, where only one SrCuO2 unit cell is deposited in the stacking sequence. These results show that tr uly new structures can be obtained by a layer-by-layer deposition tech nique with a low interfacial disorder and give strong support to the i dea of synthesizing new artificial high-T-c structures by the PLD tech nique.