High‐Performance Doped Silver Films: Overcoming Fundamental Material Limits for Nanophotonic Applications
Abstract
The field of nanophotonics has ushered in a new paradigm of light manipulation by enabling deep subdiffraction confinement assisted by metallic nanostructures. However, a key limitation which has stunted a full development of high‐performance nanophotonic devices is the typical large losses associated with the constituent metals. Although silver has long been known as the highest quality plasmonic material for visible and near infrared applications, its usage has been limited due to practical issues of continuous thin film formation, stability, adhesion, and surface roughness. Recently, a solution is proposed to the above issues by doping a proper amount of aluminum during silver deposition. In this work, the potential of doped silver for nanophotonic applications is presented by demonstrating several high‐performance key nanophotonic devices. First, long‐range surface plasmon polariton waveguides show propagation distances of a few centimeters. Second, hyperbolic metamaterials consisting of ultrathin Al‐doped Ag films are attained having a homogeneous and low‐loss response, and supporting a broad range of high‐k modes. Finally, transparent conductors based on Al‐doped Ag possess both a high and flat transmittance over the visible and near‐IR range.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Mar 20, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1002/adma.201605177
Entities
People
- Alexandra Boltasseva
- Cheng Zhang
- Chengang Ji
- L. Jay Guo
- Long Chen
- Marcello Ferrera
- Mingjie Xu
- Nathaniel Kinsey
- Vladimir Shalaev
- Xiaoqing Pan
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Heriot-Watt University
- National Science Foundation
- Purdue University
- University of California, Irvine
- University of Michigan