Study of surface effect in n-type SrTiO3/LaAlO3 heterostructure by first principle calculations

Abstract

It is obvious that the electronic properties of a heterostructure crucially depend on the combination of atomic layers at the interface. But, surprisingly it also depends on the termination of the substrate and epitaxial layers. Here, we have studied two different n-type SrTiO3/LaAlO3 heterostructure, one starting with SrO and terminated with AlO2 and the other having TiO2 and LaO at the two ends. We show that in the first case the system is insulating and in other case it is metallic even though the atomic layers at the interface are unchanged.