Growth of phase pure yttrium iron garnet thin films on silicon: The effect of substrate and post deposition annealing temperatures

Recently, monolithic integration of yttrium iron garnet (YIG) on silicon has attracted significant research interest both for photonic and spintronic applications. Growing phase pure, high magnetization YIG thin films on silicon is still a challenging quest. So far, different deposition and annealing conditions have been reported from different groups, leading to YIG thin films with different magnetic properties.[1-4] A systematic study on the growth condition on integrating a phase pure YIG thin film on silicon is lack. In this study, we systematically studied the effect of substrate temperature (T_sub) and post deposition annealing temperatures (T_annl) on growing phase pure YIG thin films on silicon. The results show that the deposition substrate temperature is critical for maintaining the YIG material stoichiometry; while the rapid thermal annealing (RTA) temperature is important for achieving phase purity and high saturation magnetization (M_s). Both the deposition temperature and RTA temperature are important for growing phase pure YIG on silicon.