Structural and Photoelectric Properties of Epitaxially Grown Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films on c-Plane Sapphire and Titanium Dioxide.

Vanadium dioxide (VO) is one of the most extensively studied materials in the strongly correlated electron family capable of sustaining an insulator-to-metal transition. Here we present our studies of high-quality thin films of epitaxially grown VO on c-AlO(0001) and TiO(001) via reactive DC pulsed magnetron sputtering. We present the structural transition probed via Reflection High Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED) for the first time and we correlate the surface microstructure measurements with simulations before, during, and after the thermally induced transition.