Long-distance remote epitaxy.

Jia, Ru; Xin, Yan; Potter, Mark; Jiang, Jie; Wang, Zixu; Ma, Hanxue; Zhang, Zhihao; Liang, Zhizhuo et al. · Nature · 2025

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

Remote epitaxy, in which an epitaxial relation is established between a film and a substrate through remote interactions, enables the development of high-quality single crystalline epilayers and their transfer to and integration with other technologically crucial substates<sup>1,2</sup>. It is commonly believed that in remote epitaxy, the distance within which the remote interaction can play a leading part in the epitaxial process is less than 1 nm, as the atomically resolved fluctuating electric potential decays very rapidly to a negligible value after a few atomic distances<sup>3</sup>. Here we show that it is possible to achieve remote epitaxy when the epilayer-substrate distance is as large as 2-7 nm. We experimentally demonstrate long-distance remote epitaxy of CsPbBr<sub>3</sub> film on an NaCl substrate, KCl film on a KCl substrate and ZnO microrods on GaN, and show that a dislocation in the GaN substrate exists immediately below every remotely epitaxial ZnO microrod. These findings indicate that remote epitaxy could be designed and engineered by means of harnessing defect-mediated long-distance remote interactions.