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Linear and Nonlinear Optical Properties of SiO$_2$/TiO$_2$ Heterostructures Grown by Plasma Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition

Published 6 days agoVersion 2arXiv:2512.09819

Authors

Jinsong Liu, Martin Mičulka, Raihan Rafi, Sebastian Beer, Denys Sevriukov, Stefan Nolte, Sven Schröder, Andreas Tünnermann, Isabelle Staude, Adriana Szeghalmi

Categories

cond-mat.mtrl-sciphysics.app-ph

Abstract

Second harmonic (SH) radiation can only be generated in non-centrosymmetric bulk crystals under the electric-dipole approximation. Nonlinear thin films made from bulk crystals are technologically challenging because of complex and high temperature fabrication processes. In this work, heterostructures made of amorphous materials SiO$_2$ and TiO$_2$ were prepared by a CMOS-compatible technique named plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) with deposition temperature at 100 °C. By using the uniaxial dispersion model, we characterized the form-birefringence properties, which can enable the phase matching condition in waveguides or other nonlinear optical applications. By applying a fringe-based technique, we determined the largest diagonal component of the effective second-order bulk susceptibility $χ_{zzz}^{(2)}$ = 1.30$\pm$0.13 pm/V at a wavelength of 1032 nm. Noteworthy, we observed strong SH signals from two-component nanolaminates, which are several orders of magnitude larger than from single layers. The SH signals from our samples only require the broken inversion symmetry at the interface. Here optical properties of nanocomposites can be precisely tuned by the promising PEALD technology.

Linear and Nonlinear Optical Properties of SiO$_2$/TiO$_2$ Heterostructures Grown by Plasma Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition

6 days ago
v2
10 authors

Categories

cond-mat.mtrl-sciphysics.app-ph

Abstract

Second harmonic (SH) radiation can only be generated in non-centrosymmetric bulk crystals under the electric-dipole approximation. Nonlinear thin films made from bulk crystals are technologically challenging because of complex and high temperature fabrication processes. In this work, heterostructures made of amorphous materials SiO$_2$ and TiO$_2$ were prepared by a CMOS-compatible technique named plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) with deposition temperature at 100 °C. By using the uniaxial dispersion model, we characterized the form-birefringence properties, which can enable the phase matching condition in waveguides or other nonlinear optical applications. By applying a fringe-based technique, we determined the largest diagonal component of the effective second-order bulk susceptibility $χ_{zzz}^{(2)}$ = 1.30$\pm$0.13 pm/V at a wavelength of 1032 nm. Noteworthy, we observed strong SH signals from two-component nanolaminates, which are several orders of magnitude larger than from single layers. The SH signals from our samples only require the broken inversion symmetry at the interface. Here optical properties of nanocomposites can be precisely tuned by the promising PEALD technology.

Authors

Jinsong Liu, Martin Mičulka, Raihan Rafi et al. (+7 more)

arXiv ID: 2512.09819
Published Dec 10, 2025

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