Epitaxial growth and characterization of strained LaCoO$_{3}$ on Si (100)

LaCoO$_{3}$ is a correlated oxide that normally has a diamagnetic ground state in bulk. The material undergoes a spin-state transition and becomes paramagnetic at higher temperatures. In this work, we report the epitaxial growth of strained LaCoO$_{3}$ on silicon via a fully-relaxed SrTiO$_{3}$ buffer layer using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). We confirm that the strained LaCoO$_{3}$ becomes ferromagnetic with a Curie temperature of ~85 K, similar to recent reports for films grown by pulsed laser deposition. We will discuss the issues related to the MBE growth of LaCoO$_{3}$ and show results of x-ray diffraction, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and SQUID magnetometry measurements on LaCoO$_{3}$ films grown on silicon.