Enhanced Second Harmonic Generation from Ferroelectric HfO 2 -Based Hybrid Metasurfaces

Integrated nonlinear metasurfaces leading to high-efficiency optical second harmonic generation (SHG) are highly desirable for optical sensing, imaging, and quantum photonic systems. Compared to traditional metal-only metasurfaces, their hybrid counterparts, where a non-centrosymmetric nonlinear photonic material is incorporated in the near field of a metasurface, they can significantly boost SHG efficiency. However, it is difficult to integrate such devices on-chip due to material incompatibilities, thickness scaling challenges and narrow optical band gaps of nonlinear optical materials. Here, we demonstrate significantly enhanced SHG in on-chip integrated metasurfaces by using nanometer thin ferroelectric Y:HfO thin films. This material has the merit of CMOS compatibility, ultra-violet transparency up to 250 nm and extraordinary scalability down to sub 10 nm when deposited on silicon. We observe twenty times magnitude enhancement of the SHG intensity from the hybrid metasurface compared to a bare ferroelectric HfO thin film. Moreover, a 3-fold SHG enhancement is observed from the hybrid metasurface compared to a control structure using non-ferroelectric HfO2, demonstrating a major contribution to the SHG signal from ferroelectric Y:HfO . The second-order nonlinear optical coefficient χ of Y:HfO is determined to be 6.0 ± 0.5 pm/V, which is comparable to other complex nonlinear photonic oxide materials. Our work provides a general pathway to build an efficient on-chip nanophotonic nonlinear light source for SHG using ferroelectric HfO thin films.