Impedance-matched High-Overtone Thickness-Shear Bulk Acoustic Resonators with Scalable Mode Volume

Abstract: High overtone bulk acoustic resonators are essential components in microwave signal processing and emerging quantum technologies; however, conventional designs suffer from limited impedance matching, spurious mode interference, and restricted scalability. Here we introduce a laterally excited high overtone thickness shear bulk acoustic resonator, abbreviated as X HTBAR, that overcomes these limitations through a fully planar excitation scheme. The X HTBAR employs a 3 micron thick 128 degree Y cut LiNbO3 piezoelectric film on a 500 micron high resistivity silicon substrate, enabling efficient excitation of thickness shear modes through lateral electrodes without the need for bottom electrodes and confining the acoustic field between the top electrodes. This configuration removes parasitic loss channels, increases energy transfer efficiency to greater than ninety nine percent, and provides a stable free spectral range of about 5.75 MHz with very small fluctuations. Experimental measurements show comb like phonon spectra spanning 0.1 to 1.8 GHz, high quality factors in the range of ten to the power of three to ten to the power of five, frequency quality products larger than ten to the power of thirteen at room temperature, and a low temperature coefficient of frequency. In addition, a gridded electrode design together with the intrinsic properties of 128 degree Y cut LiNbO3, including insensitivity to electrode spacing and a large electromechanical coupling coefficient, suppresses spurious modes and allows tunable mode volumes from 0.008 to 0.064 cubic millimeters. These combined features give X HTBAR devices excellent integration compatibility and strong immunity to electrode related perturbations, making them promising multimode phonon sources for large scale quantum interconnects and microwave photonic integrated circuits.