AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition
    Nanometer-scale Science and Technology Monday Sessions
       Session NS+EN-MoA

Paper NS+EN-MoA11
Extreme Tunability of Metal-Dielectric Multilayered Structures using Al-doped ZnO Grown by Atomic Layer Deposition

Monday, November 10, 2014, 5:20 pm, Room 304

Session: Nanophotonics and Plasmonics 
Presenter: Jonathan Skuza, Norfolk State University
Authors: J.R. Skuza, Norfolk State University
R.M. Mundle, Norfolk State University
K.C. Santiago, Norfolk State University
D.L. Lepkowski, Louisiana State University
A.K. Pradhan, Norfolk State University
Correspondent: Click to Email
Plasmonic metamaterials have been a burgeoning area of research in recent years, where surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) can manipulate light on the nanoscale. Typically, noble metals (e.g. Ag, Au) have been the key materials in this field of research, but suffer drawbacks (e.g. high loss) especially in the mid- and near-infrared (NIR) spectral ranges. Recently, wide bandgap semiconductors, such as Al-doped ZnO (AZO), have been shown to hold great potential in surpassing the tunability and flexibility of traditional noble metals in nanoplasmonic applications. Generally, these transparent conducting oxides have been extremely important for various optoelectronic applications due to the coexistence of high conductivity and high transparency, which can be tuned through doping. Recent studies have shown that these wide bandgap semiconductors, in particular AZO, are also efficient nanoplasmonic materials in the NIR due to their metallic behavior, strong confinement of SPPs, and low loss. AZO has been studied extensively using a multitude of deposition techniques, especially atomic layer deposition (ALD), which is particularly useful to grow uniform and conformal films with a high degree of thickness control on complex three-dimensional topographies because it is based on a binary sequence of self-limiting surface chemical reactions. Furthermore, the doping concentration can be precisely controlled by adjusting the ALD cycle ratios of the host and dopant materials, thus making ALD a unique and powerful method to deposit AZO into high aspect ratio structures for nanoplasmonic applications. Recently, it has been shown that ALD-grown AZO offers extreme tunability that can be utilized for many applications, including plasmonic components for epsilon-near-zero metamaterials. This extreme tunability is exploited here in metal-dielectric multilayered structures in order to manipulate and control light in subwavelength volumes for various optical applications.