Thickness dependent thermal conductivity of strontium titanate thin films on silicon substrate

Perovskite materials, of which strontium titanate (STO) and its thin films are an example, have attracted significant scientific interest because of their desirable properties and the potential to tune thermal conductivity by employing several techniques. Notably, strontium titanate thin films on silicon (Si) substrates serve as a fundamental platform for integrating various oxides onto Si substrates, making it crucial to understand the thermal properties of STO on Si. This work investigates the thermal conductivity of STO thin films on an Si substrate for varying film thicknesses (12, 50, 80, and 200 nm) at room temperature (∼300 K). The thin films are deposited using molecular beam epitaxy on the Si substrate and their thermal conductivity is characterized using the frequency domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) method. The measured values range from 7.4 ± 0.74 for the 200 nm thick film to 0.8 ± 0.1 W m−1 K−1 for the 12 nm thick film, showing a large effect of the film thickness on the thermal conductivity values. The trend of the values is diminishing with the corresponding decrease in the thin film thickness, with a reduction of 38%–93% in the thermal conductivity values, for film thicknesses ranging from 200 to 12 nm. This reduction in the values is relative to the bulk single crystal values of STO, which may range from 11 to 13.5 W m−1 K−1 [Yu et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 92, 191911 (2008) and Fumega et al., Phys. Rev. Mater. 4, 033606 (2020)], as measured by our FDTR-based experiment. The study also explores the evaluation of volumetric heat capacity (Cp). The measured volumetric heat capacity for the 200 nm thin film is 3.07 MJ m−3 K−1, which is in reasonable agreement with the values available in the literature.