Correlated evolution of structure and mechanical loss of a sputtered silica film

Massimo Granata (1) , Elodie Coillet (2) , Valérie Martinez (2) , Vincent Dolique (1) , Alex Amato (1) , Maurizio Canepa , Jérémie Margueritat (2) , Christine Martinet (2) , Alain Mermet (2) , Christophe Michel (1) , Laurent Pinard (1) , Benoît Sassolas (1) , Gianpietro Cagnoli (1, 2)

1 LMA - Laboratoire des matériaux avancés
2 ILM - Institut Lumière Matière [Villeurbanne]

Energy dissipation in amorphous coatings severely affects high-precision optical and quantum transducers. In order to isolate the source of coating loss, we performed an extensive study of Raman scattering and mechanical loss of a thermally treated sputtered silica coating. Our results show that loss is correlated with the population of three-membered rings of Si- O 4 tetrahedral units and support the evidence that thermal treatment reduces the density of metastable states separated by a characteristic energy of about 0.5 eV in favor of an increase of the density of states separated by smaller activation energies.

Domains: Instrumentation and Detectors [physics.ins-det]

Massimo Granata, Elodie Coillet, Valérie Martinez, Vincent Dolique, Alex Amato, et al.. Correlated evolution of structure and mechanical loss of a sputtered silica film. Phys.Rev.Mater., 2018, 2 (05), pp.053607. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.2.053607⟩. ⟨hal-01881003⟩