Kavli Affiliate: Grace Xing
| Summary:
We report the structural and electronic properties of niobium nitride (NbN) thin films grown by molecular beam epitaxy on c-plane sapphire with miscut angles of $0.5^texto$, $2^texto$, $4^texto$, and $10^texto$ towards m-axis. X-ray diffraction (XRD) scans reveal that the full width at half maximum of the rocking curves around the 1 1 1 reflection of these NbN films decreases with increasing miscut. Starting from 76 arcsecs on $0.5^texto$ miscut, the FWHM reduces to almost 20 arcsecs on $10^texto$ miscut sapphire indicating improved structural quality. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images indicate that NbN on c-sapphire has around 10 nm critical thickness, irrespective of the substrate miscut, above which it turns columnar. The improved structural property is correlated with a marginal increment in superconducting transition temperature $T_textc$ from 12.1 K for NbN on $0.5^texto$ miscut sapphire to 12.5 K for NbN on $10^texto$ miscut sapphire.
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