Epitaxial growth of ruthenium dioxide films by chemical vapor deposition and its comparison with similarly grown chromium dioxide films

Epitaxial ruthenium oxide (RuO2) thin films have been grown on (100) TiO2 substrates by chemical vapor deposition at temperatures as low as 300 °C using tris(2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-3,5-heptanedionato)ruthenium [Ru(TMHD)3] as a precursor with oxygen carrier gas. These films exhibit low resistivity, with room-temperature values as low as ∼40 μΩ cm. The surface morphology, epitaxial strain and resistivity as a function of film thickness have been compared with those of similarly deposited epitaxial CrO2 films on TiO2. The temperature dependence of the resistivity for both set of films can be fit well using a combination of the Bloch-Gruneisen formula for electron-phonon scattering and additional scattering terms, including magnon scattering in the case of CrO2.