Electric Field Confinement Optimization in Polycrystalline Barium Titanate Metasurfaces for Electro-Optic Modulation

One crucial area of focus in photonics is telecommunications, in which high-speed data transmission plays a central role. Nonlinear optical materials have been instrumental in these developments due to the presence of the electro-optic Pockels effect which facilitates the signal transfer between electronic and optical devices. Among these materials, barium titanate (BaTiO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf>) is a promising metal-oxide with exceptionally high electro-optic coefficients and nonlinear optical properties. Since this material is neither integrable nor scalable in its bulk form, considerable efforts have been directed towards attaining BaTiO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> films in the nanometre scale through molecular beam epitaxy, metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, and pulsed laser deposition [1]. However, its adoption in thin-film form is hindered by the challenges of conventional top-down fabrication techniques, which often require costly equipment and yield limited scalability.