Terahertz ellipsometry study of the soft mode behavior in ultrathin SrTiO films

We present a combined study with time-domain terahertz and conventional far-infrared ellipsometry of the temperature dependent optical response of SrTiO₃thin films (82 and 8.5 nm) that are grown by pulsed-laser deposition on (La0.3Sr0.7) (Al0.65Ta0.35)O₃ (LSAT) substrates. We demonstrate that terahertz ellipsometry is very sensitive to the optical response of these thin films, in particular, to the soft mode of SrTiO₃. We show that for the 82 nm film the eigenfrequency of the soft mode is strongly reduced by annealing at 1200 °C, whereas for the 8.5 nm film it is hardly affected. For the latter, after annealing the mode remains at 125 cm⁻¹ at 300 K and exhibits only a weak softening to about 90 cm⁻¹ at 10 K. This suggests that this ultrathin film undergoes hardly any relaxation of the compressive strain due to the LSAT substrate