| Summary: | Lateral compositionally-graded thin films are powerful media for the observation of phase boundaries as well as for high-throughput materials exploration. We herein propose a method to prepare epitaxial lateral compositionally-graded films using a dual-beam pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method with two targets separated by a partition. Tuning the ambient pressure and the partition—substrate gap makes it possible to control of the gradient length of the deposits at the small sizes (≤ 10 mm) suitable for commercial oxide single crystal substrates. A simple Monte Carlo simulation qualitatively reproduced the characteristic features of the lateral thickness distribution. To demonstrate this method, we prepared (1<i>–x</i>)PbTiO<sub>3</sub>—<i>x</i>PbZrO<sub>3</sub> and (1<i>–x</i>)LaMnO<sub>3</sub>—<i>x</i>La<sub>0.6</sub>Sr<sub>0.4</sub>MnO<sub>3</sub> films with lateral composition gradient widths of 10 and 1 mm, respectively, with the partitioned dual PLD.
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