ELECTRICAL AND OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF PULSED LASER DEPOSITED TRANSITION METAL NITRIDE AND OXIDE THIN FILMS FOR PHOTONIC APPLICATIONS

Abstract

In this thesis, we studied growth and properties of the promising alternative materials for data communications: transition metal nitride (TMN) for plasmonics and barium titanate (BTO) for active photonics. The growth method used was pulsed laser deposition (PLD). In part one, we installed an atomic nitrogen source onto our PLD system to deal with the common issues in nitride growth by traditional PLD (oxygen and metal impurity contamination). We first demonstrated near-stoichiometry TaN thin film growth with oxygen and metal impurity contamination suppressed. We then use the method to grow TiN and observed great improvements in electrical and optical properties compared with traditional PLD. In part two, we identify a group of substrates for BTO growth which concurrently enable high-quality single crystal c-axis BTO thin film growth and vertical mode confinement. We explored the growth conditions and studied the optical properties of both the BTO thin films and the substrates.