Light scattering from acoustic vibrational modes in confined structures

The acoustic vibrational modes and their light scattering intensities in confined structures such as supported films, double layer free-standing membrane and sub-micron sized wires on a free-standing membrane have been studied using Brillouin Light Scattering (BLS).; Standing wave type acoustic phonons were recently observed in supported thin films of silicon oxy-nitride. We build upon this finding to study the acoustic modes in thin zinc selenide (ZnSe) films on gallium arsenide (GaAs). The surprising behaviour of the Brillouin intensities of the standing wave modes in ZnSe are explained in terms of interference of the elasto-optic scattering amplitudes from the film and substrate. Numerical calculations of the scattering cross-section, which takes into account ripple and elasto-optic scattering mechanism, agrees well with the experimental data.; Light scattering studies of standing wave type modes in free-standing polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) layer on Si3N4 were carried out. In these bilayer structures PMMA is much softer than Si3N 4, a property that leads to confinement of low frequency modes associated with the PMMA layer to within its boundaries. In addition, the flexural and the dilatational modes from the Si3N4 layer are observed and are found to hybridize with the standing wave modes from the PMMA layer.; Our study of phonon modes in PMMA wires supported on a free-standing Si3N4 membrane extends our work on free-standing double layer membranes. In recent years there is much interest in the study of phonon modes in nano-scale structures such as wires or dots. Although much theoretical work has been carried out in this direction, no experiments exist that explore the dispersion of the phonon modes in such structures. Brillouin Light scattering is ideally suited for studying phonons in such reduced dimensions and our work represents the first effort in this direction. The spectra reveal modes which are quantized both along the width, as well along the thickness of the wires. In addition torsional, shear and dliatational modes of the PMMA wires are observed. The mode amplitudes are analyzed by the use of xyz algorithm.