Kinetics of Vacancy Doping in SrTiO3 Studied by in situ Electrical Resistivity

The kinetics of annealing to transform stoichiometric SrTiO3 insulator into a vacancy-doped semiconductor-superconductor was revisited by in situ electrical resistivity measurements. SrTiO3 single crystals were grown by Floating Zone Method. Using a homemade apparatus several electrical resistivity as a function of time were measured at different temperatures, which allows one to study the creation of vacancies during annealing under vacuum. The activation energy for the oxygen vacancies formation/charge doping in SrTiO3 was estimated as 1.4±0.3 eV using solid-state kinetics approach.