Fabrication and materials for magneto-photonic assemblies for high-gain antenna applications at GHz frequencies.

摘要

Recent magnetic photonic assembly (MPA) designs for high-gain antennas contain arrays of low-loss, anisotropic dielectrics and ferrimagnetic materials. Anisotropic dielectrics (AD) are fabricated from laminates, which consist of two ceramics with largely different permittivity and low dielectric losses at GHz frequencies. High gain has been demonstrated in a prototype antenna with 2 sets of 3 mutually rotated AD layers. These layers were made from laminates of commercially available alpha-Al2O3 and Nd-doped barium titanate. Equivalent permittivity tensors and loss tangents (tan delta∼1.9x10-3) were characterized using a resonant cavity based approach, coupled with a finite-element method (FEM) full-wave solver. To enable further minimization of dielectric loss (tan delta), dense high-purity alpha-Al2O3 and TiO2 were prepared starting from colloidally stabilizing the powders in aqueous HNO3 or NH3. After colloidal filtration and sintering, alpha-Al 2O3 with >97.9% density was achieved at a sintering temperature of 1300°C, and TiO2 with >99.5% density was obtained at 1000°C. These low sintering temperatures are ascribed to excellent compact homogeneity. TiO2 was obtained with tan delta of 1.4x10-4 at 6.4 GHz at room temperature. This relatively low value is attributed to the homogeneous dense microstructure with 2.2 mum grain size. Al 3+ was doped into TiO2 using a modified infiltration method to compensate for the effect of Ti4+ reduction. A homogeneous microstructure and doping concentration were also observed in the doped dense TiO2. Substituted Y3Fe5O12 (YIG) garnet was chosen as the ferrimagnetic (F) component, due to its pronounced Faraday rotation effect and potentially low magnetic and dielectric loss. Phase pure garnet was prepared by using the citric-gel method. The magnetic properties were studied for Ca,V,Zr-substituted YIG (CVZG) and as-prepared particle morphology. Compacts of CVZG submicron particles were found to possess a low loss at GHz frequencies, and will be applied in future MPAs structures.