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.
