The ongoing search for earth-abundant transparent conduction oxides (TCOs) highlighted the correlated metal SrVO₃ as a potential candidate. SrVO₃ exhibits high conductivity and transparency in the visible. Moreover, SrVO₃ is an attractive candidate for future electronics. A major challenge in the synthesis of high quality SrVO₃ is to mitigate the formation of defects in the film. These defects can cause electron scattering which results in resistivity increase and it obscures some of the interesting physics. Film growth was done with molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), providing a scalable fabrication process. In this work we present low defect SrVO₃ films with residual resistivity ratios exceeding 10 and room temperature resistivities in the order of 30 µΩ·cm. The analysis of the structural and electronic properties of the SrVO₃ films paves the way towards further improvement of their quality and their implementation as TCO in optoelectronics, and provides a route towards studies of their electron correlation in clean systems.

This work was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF Grant 375/17).