Abstract
Remote epitaxy, in which an epitaxial relation is established between a film and a substrate through remote interactions, enables the development of high-quality single crystalline epilayers and their transfer to and integration with other technologically crucial substates1,2. It is commonly believed that in remote epitaxy, the distance within which the remote interaction can play a leading part in the epitaxial process is less than 1 nm, as the atomically resolved fluctuating electric potential decays very rapidly to a negligible value after a few atomic distances3. Here we show that it is possible to achieve remote epitaxy when the epilayer–substrate distance is as large as 2–7 nm. We experimentally demonstrate long-distance remote epitaxy of CsPbBr3 film on an NaCl substrate, KCl film on a KCl substrate and ZnO microrods on GaN, and show that a dislocation in the GaN substrate exists immediately below every remotely epitaxial ZnO microrod. These findings indicate that remote epitaxy could be designed and engineered by means of harnessing defect-mediated long-distance remote interactions.
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Data availability
The datasets generated or analysed during this study are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15770342)51 and from the corresponding authors upon request.
Code availability
Public packages were used for computational studies and the relevant results are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15770342)51, as well as from the corresponding authors upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation under award numbers 2110814, 2015557 and 2024972 and by the NYSTAR Focus Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under award number C180117. This work was also supported by the US National Science Foundation (Platform for the Accelerated Realization, Analysis, and Discovery of Interface Materials (PARADIM)) under Cooperative Agreement no. DMR-1539918 and made use of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) Shared Facilities, which are supported through the NSF MRSEC Program (no. DMR-1719875). TEM work was performed at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which is supported by National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement no. DMR-2128556 and the State of Florida. We also thank the support from US Army Research Office under ARO grant W911NF2410375.
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J.S. and R.J. conceived and developed the idea and planned the experiments. R.J., J.J., Y.S., Y.X., H.G. and J.S. planned the experiments. R.J., Z.W., Z.Z. and H.M. prepared samples and devices and performed optical imaging, XRD, spectroscopy and photoresponse measurements. Y.X. and H.G. performed TEM and STEM measurements. M.P. and Y.S. performed computational simulations. L.Z. and Z.L. performed SEM and EBSD measurements. R.Y., R.J. and J.L. performed AFM measurements. S.P., K.P., Y.M. and Y.H. contributed to the experimental setups. R.J., Y.S. and Y.X. processed the data, and R.J. Y.X., Y.S. and J.S. interpreted the results. R.J. wrote the initial draft, and J.S., Y.S. Y.X. and Z.W. revised the manuscript. G.-C.W., T.-M.L., W.B. and all the other authors participated in discussion of data collection and/or analysis.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–41 and Table 1.
Supplementary Video 1
a-C membrane floating on water.
Supplementary Video 2
Our molecular dynamics simulation of deposition of NaCl on 7-nm a-C-coated NaCl substrate containing two edge dislocations, at 900 K. The islands were not aligned owing to their smaller size, lower interaction and high deposition rates.
Supplementary Video 3
Defocus–focus–overfocus approach under an optical microscope for identification of epitaxially aligned ZnO microrods.
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Jia, R., Xin, Y., Potter, M. et al. Long-distance remote epitaxy. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09484-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09484-z
