Study of microwave dielectric properties of perovskite thin films by near-field microscopy

Perovskite thin film materials possess good dielectric properties, which vary with applied voltage, and have thus been thoroughly investigated for applications as thin film tunable microwave devices. However, the tunability of the thin film materials derived from the frequency response of the thin film devices suffers from ambiguity in extracting the true dielectric response of the thin film materials in microwave frequency regime. To circumvent such a difficulty, we investigated the dielectric properties of perovskite thin films by using a novel scanning evanescent microwave microscopy (SEMM). To extract the dielectric parameters from original microwave frequency response signal of SEMM probe, we perform a 3-dimensional (3D) finite element simulation to model the frequency behavior of the SEMM microwave probe. Dielectric images of the thin films with submicron resolution can be obtained by using such a near-field technique, which correlates very well with the morphology of the films examined by atomic force microscopy. Moreover, the dielectric images of dielectric thin films were compared to those of ferroelectric thin films in order to discuss the related dielectric mechanism of the materials.