Evolutionary selection growth of silver films for low-loss nanophotonic devices

4 may 2023

When talking about nanophotonics, quantum computing and sensing high-quality factor plasmonic devices are playing crucial role. In most cases for making such devices one has to use non-lattice matched or transparent amorphous substrates. Plasmonic devices quality factor is mainly determined by ohmic losses, scattering losses at grain boundaries, and in-plane plasmonic scattering losses of a metal – substrate system. We demonstrate here the e-beam evaporation method to deposit ultralow-loss silver thin films on transparent lattice-mismatched substrates. This process corresponds to evolutionary selection growth mode.

The key feature of our approach is a precise control during the whole process consisting of film deposition on a cold substrate, self-crystallization and subsequent annealing for stress relaxation. In particular, the stress relaxation leads to further grains growth. We are able to deposit 100 nm thick polycrystalline silver films with micrometer-scale grains, low roughness and ultralow optical losses. Finally, we show ultrahigh-quality factor plasmonic silver nanostructures on transparent lattice-mismatched substrate. This can be of the great interest for high performance and single-molecule optical sensors applications.

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Publication output:

Evolutionary selection growth of silver films for low-loss nanophotonic devices

Aleksandr S. Baburin, Dmitry O. Moskalev, Evgeniy S. Lotkov, Olga S. Sorokina, Dmitry A. Baklykov, Sergey S. Avdeev, Kirill A. Buzaverov, Georgiy M. Yankovskii, Alexander V. Baryshev, Ilya A. Ryzhikov, Ilya A. Rodionov

Surfaces and Interfaces, volume 39, July 2023, 102897 (ImF 6,137)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468023023002675?via%3Dihub

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