Thickness-dependent in-plane anisotropy of GaTe phonons

Abstract

Abstract Gallium Telluride (GaTe), a layered material with monoclinic crystal structure, has recently attracted a lot of attention due to its unique physical properties and potential applications for angle-resolved photonics and electronics, where optical anisotropies are important. Despite a few reports on the in-plane anisotropies of GaTe, a comprehensive understanding of them remained unsatisfactory to date. In this work, we investigated thickness-dependent in-plane anisotropies of the 13 Raman-active modes and one Raman-inactive mode of GaTe by using angle-resolved polarized Raman spectroscopy, under both parallel and perpendicular polarization configurations in the spectral range from 20 to 300 cm−1. Raman modes of GaTe revealed distinctly different thickness-dependent anisotropies in parallel polarization configuration while nearly unchanged for the perpendicular configuration. Especially, three Ag modes at 40.2 ( $${\text{A}}_{\text{g}}^{1}$$ A g 1 ), 152.5 ( $${\text{A}}_{\text{g}}^{7}$$ A g 7 ), and 283.8 ( $${\text{A}}_{\text{g}}^{12}$$ A g 12 ) cm−1 exhibited an evident variation in anisotropic behavior as decreasing thickness down to 9 nm. The observed anisotropies were thoroughly explained by adopting the calculated interference effect and the semiclassical complex Raman tensor analysis.