Polar Phonon Behaviour in Polycrystalline Bi-Doped Strontium Titanate Thin Films

Alexander Tkach; Olena Okhay; Dmitry Nuzhnyy; Jan Petzelt; Paula M Vilarinho

doi:10.3390/ma14216414

Polar Phonon Behaviour in Polycrystalline Bi-Doped Strontium Titanate Thin Films

Materials (Basel). 2021 Oct 26;14(21):6414. doi: 10.3390/ma14216414.

Authors

Alexander Tkach¹, Olena Okhay², Dmitry Nuzhnyy³, Jan Petzelt³, Paula M Vilarinho¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials and Ceramic Engineering, CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal.
² TEMA-Centre for Mechanical Technology and Automation, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal.
³ Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Slovance 2, 182 21 Prague, Czech Republic.

Abstract

Strontium titanate-based materials with ferroelectric or relaxor-like properties have drawn vast attention as polar dielectrics for electronics and telecommunications. Here, we study the lattice dynamics in sol-gel-derived Sr_1-1.5xBi_xTiO₃ thin films with x = 0.0053 and 0.167, deposited on Al₂O₃ substrates, using a variable-temperature far-infrared spectroscopy in a transmittance mode. Bi doping, known to induce a low-frequency dielectric relaxation in SrTiO₃ (ST) ceramics and films, due to off-centre dopant ion displacements generating electric dipoles, is shown to affect the polar phonon behaviour of thin films. We show that in weakly Bi-doped films, the low-frequency polar TO1 mode softens on cooling but less than in undoped ST. In heavily Bi-doped ST films, this mode displays no significant frequency variation with temperature from 300 to 10 K. The polar phonon behaviour of polycrystalline Bi-doped ST thin films is comparable with that of Bi-doped ST ceramics, which exhibit dielectric relaxations and harden soft-mode behaviour instead of the ferroelectric phase transition.

Keywords: infrared spectroscopy; perovskites; polar dielectrics; thin films.

Abstract

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