Study of manganese oxide thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition

In this paper, we report on the growth of manganese oxides thin films by Pulsed Laser Deposition using an MnO target at various oxygen pressures and substrate temperatures ranging from 550 to 800 °C. Grazing Incidence X-Ray Diffraction measurements on the grown films revealed that, at low deposition temperature, the dominant phase is Mn2O3, but as the deposition temperature was raised above 700 °C, a phase transformation occurred leading to the formation of Mn3O4. In a qualitative comparison, in the temperature range of 500–850 °C, and at a pressure below 13 Pa, the phase diagram of bulk manganese oxides and our grown films show a fair correlation. The films grown near the transition temperature (T = 700 °C) were found to be very thin compared to those grown at lower or higher temperatures, but the surface roughness was found to increase with temperature, as determined by Atomic Force Microscopy.