Sohm Apte (The University of Texas at Austin)

"Linear electro-optic effect in strontium barium niobate"

Abstract: I will present a first-principles study on the linear electro-optic or Pockels effect in SrxBa1-xNb2O6 (SBN). SBN is an attractive material for building electro-optic modulators in silicon photonics as it has one of the highest known Pockels coefficients and can be integrated on Si. We investigated the microscopic mechanism behind the giant Pockels effect and found that the optical phonon contribution dominates the electro-optic response. We identified the phonon modes that have a significant contribution to the Pockels tensor and studied the microscopic origin of the response. In addition, we analyzed the contribution of the converse piezoelectric effect to the Pockels response. We found good agreement when comparing our results to available experiment.