Dielectric dispersion of BaSrTiO3 thin film from centimeter to submillimeter wavelengths

The dielectric dispersion of ferroelectric BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST) thin film in a paraelectric phase was characterized from centimeter to submillimeter wavelengths. To this aim, interdigitated capacitors were patterned on a micrometer scale onto a BST layer with a barium concentration of 0.5 and were subsequently integrated by using a coplanar waveguide technology. The retrieval of the complex permittivity of BST was performed by vectorial scattering parameter measurements up to 190 GHz for various controlling dc field up to 300 kV/cm. At higher frequency, submillimeter wavelength measurements were performed by time domain spectroscopy under free space condition. On this basis, the dispersion of the real part of the permittivity along with the loss tangent are retrieved in agreement with a distributed interaction of ac-field with soft phonons vibration modes, and overlapping between dipole polarization and ionic polarization is observed, around 700 GHz. It is also shown that dipole polarization can be attributed to the presence of small polar nanoregions in the BST film which act as in ferroelectric material with diffuse phase transition. (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3531534]