Partial Pressure Differential and Rapid Thermal Annealing for Integrated Yttrium Iron Garnet (Yig)

Abstract

In this work, magneto-optical garnets were grown monolithically by low-temperature reactive RF sputtering, followed by an ultra-short (< 15sec) anneal. It was found that in addition to low thermal budgets due to timing, the temperature required (< 750°C) for garnet crystallization was also reduced compared to standard tube furnace annealing (> 1000°C). MgO and fused quartz were used as substrates because they will be useful for future buffer layers and optical claddings. Y-Fe-O films were made with systematically varied compositions and the chemical, structural, and optical properties of the resulting films were analyzed. A solid solution single phase field for YIG was found that spanned a wide range of compositions (30.1 ∼ 49.0 atomic % of Fe). The resulting YIG quality was measured by vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and measurements of Faraday rotation (FR). Although the XRD results showed that the films had isotropic crystallinity, the VSM indicated that shape anisotropy dominated the magnetic properties. Out of plane FR measurements yielded up to 0.2°/μm at 632nm rotations. This rotation will be higher in plane. All of these tests demonstrated that the YIG was comparable to YIG grown by standard annealing and also by in-situ crystallization.