Metal-Nitride nanocomposite thin film of nanomaze-like Cu embedded in TiN

Abstract

Nanocomposite thin film has attracted tremendous research interests, owing to its great potential to achieve multifunctionality, property enhancement and tuning, as well as new physical phenomenon exploration. In this work, a new nanocomposite thin film of Cu-TiN has been designed and fabricated by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method. The metal-nitride film exhibits interesting structure of nanomaze-like Cu nanostructure embedding into TiN matrix without apparent inter-diffusion between Cu and TiN. Such Cu-TiN nanocomposite thin film shows excellent crystallinity and highly textured growth for both Cu and TiN phases. Furthermore, interesting optical properties are obtained, for example, the real part (ε′) of the complex dielectric permittivity starts to show negative value from the wavelength of ∽450 nm, compared to the pure TiN film of ∽500 nm. In addition, strong localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) is observed at ∽400 nm for the Cu-TiN film, which suggests its great potential for optical device applications.