New Paper: Surface Oxidation of Refractory Metals
Photo copyright the authors 2026.
I'm excited to share a new paper just published in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology A, led by my collaborators Jueli Shi and Yingge Du at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory!
Growing high-quality oxide thin films from refractory metals like tungsten has long been a materials synthesis challenge — their extreme melting points and low vapor pressures make stable flux generation with conventional MBE approaches difficult. This work introduces an elegant solution: by heating a pure tungsten source under a controlled oxygen atmosphere, a thin surface oxide layer forms and continuously evaporates, delivering a stable, tunable oxide flux at far milder conditions than direct metal evaporation requires. The approach extends to molybdenum and points toward a broad family of refractory materials that could benefit from this strategy.