Controllable nanostructures on La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 thin film surfaces formed by scanning tunneling microscopy

Nanoscale structuring on La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 (LSMO) thin film surfaces has been performed by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) under ambient conditions. From line etching experiments we found that the line-depth increases in a stepwise fashion with increasing bias voltage. It also increases with decreasing scan speed and increasing scan repetition. We observed that the line-depth is an integral multiple of the LSMO out-of-plane lattice constant about 0.4 nm. Lateral structure with minimum feature size of 1 nm is possible to obtain. In addition, a four-level inverse-pyramid structure has been created on LSMO thin film surfaces. Our work shows the feasibility of using STM to fabricate controllable and complex nanostructures in LSMO thin film.