Surface and optical phonon characteristics of ZnO/diamond heterostructure

In this paper, we report on surface and optical phonon properties of ZnO/diamond heterostructure. ZnO thin film was deposited via radio-frequency magnetron sputtering on p-type diamond substrate. Polarized IR reflectance and attenuated total reflection (ATR) techniques were employed to investigate the optical phonon and surface phonon polariton (SPP) of the ZnO/diamond heterostructure, respectively. The obtained experimental spectra were fitted by the theoretical spectra simulated using a standard transfer matrix formulation. Overall, the experimental and theoretical spectra were in good agreement. To verify the origin of the observed ATR dip, surface polariton dispersion spectrum of the studied structure was generated based on standard multilayer reflection mapping technique. The result reveals that the detected ATR dip was attributed to the leaky SPP mode of ZnO.