Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme
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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten
DS 35: Application of Thin Films
DS 35.10: Talk
Friday, March 15, 2013, 11:45–12:00, H8
Epitaxial Ag: Opening Doors to New Opportunities in Plasmonics — •Charlotte E. Sanders1, Bo-Hong Li2, Chih-Kang Shih1, and Xianggang Qiu2 — 1The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Physics, Austin, TX U.S.A. — 2Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Beijing, China
It has been shown that noble metals can grow epitaxially on semiconducting and insulating substrates: although such films constitute non-wetting systems, low temperature deposition followed by room temperature annealing leads to atomically flat film. We recently made a major breakthrough with the demonstration of the superiority of epitaxial Ag as a low-loss plasmonics platform in the visible regime, and with the harnessing of the special plasmonic properties of Ag for plasmonic nanolasing (Science 337, 450 (2012)). Now we have extended our investigation to the infrared regime, where we have measured extraordinary optical transmission through arrays of subwavelength-diameter perforations in order to compare the strength of plasmonic resonances in epitaxial Ag film with those in polycrystalline Ag film grown by thermal evaporation. Our results suggest (in agreement with simulation and with our previous findings in the visible regime) that the high losses and short propagation distances that until now have been typical in surface plasmon studies are due largely to scattering from the surface roughness characteristic of thermally evaporated polycrystalline films. These results, newly published in Nano Letters (doi:10.1021/nl303029s), will be elaborated upon in this presentation.