Epitaxial integration of BaTiO3 on Si for electro-optic applications

Abstract

BaTiO3 (BTO) is a highly promising material for the fabrication of electro-optic (EO) modulators due to the large effective Pockels coefficient of the material, particularly in an epitaxial form. It also has the added benefit of being readily integrated on a Si material platform via a SrTiO3 template. These two characteristics make epitaxial BTO ideal for use in next generation silicon photonics applications. Being a ferroelectric, BTO has a unique crystallographic direction in which the ferroelectric polarization points. For EO modulators, because the polarization direction controls the coupling between light and an external electric field, it is important to understand how different growth methods and subsequent processing affect the direction of the ferroelectric polarization. Certain electro-optic devices may require polarization to be in the plane of the film (in-plane switching liquid crystal devices), while other applications may require it to be normal to the plane of the film (Mach–Zehnder modulator). Here, we review the growth of epitaxial BTO on Si by a variety of deposition methods including molecular beam epitaxy, pulsed laser deposition, and RF sputtering. We summarize the resulting BTO film structure and quality based on the reported characterization results. We also discuss EO measurements of basic devices made from this material platform where such data are available.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Apr 12, 2021
Source ID
10.1116/6.0000923

Entities

People

  • Agham Posadas
  • Alexander A Demkov
  • Wei Guo

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • University of Texas at Austin

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Materials science

Readers

  • Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of Proposed Air Force Base Actions.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.
  • Semiconductor Device Technology

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy
  • Directed Energy - Pulsed-Laser Deposition