Optical Characterization of Silver Nanorod Thin Films Grown Using Oblique Angle Deposition

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2014

Abstract

Nanorods are metamaterial structures that have been shown to have wide application, ranging from biomedical uses to photovoltaic materials. These materials have unique optical characteristics. In this paper, two silver (Ag) nanorod thin-film samples are created using Glancing Angle Deposition (GLAD) at both near-room temperature (~300 K) and cryogenic temperature (~100 K). Generalized ellipsometry is used to measure the optical constants of the samples. The strong difference between the optical constants of the constituent materials and those of these thin films shows that the characteristics of the samples are due to how their metamaterial structures are defined. The principle optical axes of the films align well with the morphological characteristics of the nanostructures. The axis with the greatest index of refraction remains aligned to the principle axes but shifts orientation with respect to morphological characteristics between samples. Experimental results show differences in both magnitude and characteristics of the nanorod indexes. Reflectance and transmittance measurements are performed to extract absorptance data. The room temperature deposited sample shows a higher overall absorptance, while the cryogenic sample shows a clear orientation-dependent absorptance. Polarization data is analyzed to show that the 100 K thin film exhibits polarization-dependent absorptance, while the 300 K sample’s absorptance has a strong orientation dependence.

Comments

This is an open access article published by Hindawi and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CC BY 3.0

The "Link to Full Text" opens the full article at the publisher website. A PDF of the article is available on that page.

DOI

10.1155/2014/694982

Source Publication

Journal of Nanomaterials

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS