Electronic properties of high temperature superconducting thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition

We use a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) setup to grow ultra-thin films of high temperature superconductors (HTSC) and transfer them in-situ into a photoemission chamber. Photoemission measurements on such films allow us to study noncleavable materials, but can also give insights into aspects never measured before, like the influence of strain on the low energy electronic structure. Systematic studies of many different materials grown as films showed that Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x, Bi2Sr2Cu1O6+x, Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3O10+x, and La2-xSrxCuO4 films exhibit a conductor-like Fermi edge, but materials containing chains (such as YBa2Cu3O7-x) are prone to very rapid surface degradation, possibly related to critical oxygen loss at the surface. Among HTSC materials, La2-xSrxCuO4 is extremely interesting because of its rather simple structure and the fact that its critical temperature T, can be enhanced by epitaxial strain. Here we present our first high resolution angular resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) results on 8 unit-cell thin La2-xSrxCuO4 films on SrLaAlO4 [001] substrates. Due to the lattice mismatch, such films are compressed in the copper oxygen planes and expanded in the c-axis direction. Results show a surprisingly modified Fermi surface compared to the one of non-strained samples