PLD is commonly used for epitaxial growth, and is also found to be a convenient technique mostly for epitaxial growth.

Well for epitaxial growth by any technique (sputtering, PLD or other physical deposition methods), there are some specific deposition parameters which would lead to preferential growth, or in other words epitaxial growth.

1) A good lattice matching between the thin film material and the substrate is a prime requirement, and this will lead to preferential growth. In some case researchers have used buffer layers on unmatched substrates successfully

2) The preferential growth will definitely depend on the initial nucleation on the substrate.  This is governed by the fluence, deposition rate and temperature (for adatom mobility).

3) Pressure is quite important as it governs the collisions, and can affect the building up of a stoichiometric deposit.

In a way these deposition parameters have to be carefully optimized to obtain good preferential growth

K. Sreenivas

The preferential conditions are using arcon gas in chamber after vacuum ,substrate temperture to 300 C and rotary for sample this depends on type of material

Yes...it depends both on Material (lattice matching, orientation, miscut angle) and external (fluence, pressure, temperature, cooling/annealing conditions as well).

Epitaxy can grow in two ways:

1. Homo-Epitaxy: Substrate material and thin film material are same, so one can grow epitaxial films very easily. ex like SrTiO3 thin film on SrTiO3 substrate.

2. Hetero-Epitaxy:  Where thin film and substrate materials are different, but should have at least some lattice matching to get good epitaxial growth of thin films.

 Epitaxial quality can be measured very easily with HR-XRD regular 2theta scan, Phi scan and reciprocal space map (RSM).

Dear Fehse, our colleagues have explained synthetically and correct the causes that can lead to obtaining a layer capable of homo or heteroepitaxial growth. I would also add that depending on the lattice parameters of the substrate, growing conditions (gas pressure, laser fluence, etc.) we could get a textured growth. According to literature a thin layer show a textured when composing the crystallites have specific orientation along the direction of growth but their orientation is random relative to the plane of the substrate on which they grow. For more information see:

Abadias, G. “Stress and preferred orientation in nitride-based PVD coatings”, Surface & Coatings Technology, 202, (2008), 2223–2235.

Hope this help your cause..

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2014/ra/c4ra04353g

Hope this help your cause..

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2014/ra/c4ra04353g