Masked-assisted radial-segmented target pulsed-laser deposition: A novel method for area-selective deposition using pulsed-laser deposition

Abstract

We introduce a novel technique, masked-assisted radial-segmented target pulsed-laser deposition (MARS-PLD) for unprecedented capabilities in area-selective physical vapor deposition. The MARS-PLD setup consists of a conventional PLD chamber with mechanical feedthrough for a laterally movable mask or mask set. By this means and, in principle, the arbitrary choice of a shadow mask layout, any desired area on a substrate can be masked in order to create multinary lateral and vertical material composition gradients using radially segmented targets already described in the literature [Kneiß et al., ACS Comb. Sci. 20, 643-652 (2018)]. To illustrate the capabilities of this method, we fabricated material gradients in (Mg,Zn)O thin films with a nearly linear spatial variation of the cation composition of 15at.%mm−1. Additionally, we fine-tuned our setup to fabricate a material gradient on a predefined two-dimensional lateral pattern to demonstrate the versatile capabilities of the MARS-PLD technique.