Optical properties of non-dilute metal–insulator composites

Abstract

The description of the optical properties of metal–insulator composites in the non-dilute region is a long standing problem. In this letter we extract the spectral density function of cobalt–amorphous aluminum oxide composites from optical and near-infrared data. The spectral functions are accurately computed numerically with the help of a recently developed technique. It is observed that the spectral features of the prepared composites change with increasing cobalt content. For low concentrations of cobalt, only one depolarization peak is found that corresponds to the Maxwell Garnett approximation. For concentrations higher than 11% cobalt, three effective depolarization factors are resolved that move towards low spectral parameter values with increasing cobalt content. Such a multi-peak structure arises naturally in fractal equivalent circuit models for the optical properties. A comparison with a deterministic fractal model is presented to illustrate the strength of the spectral density representation and to better comprehend our results. We conclude that the observed behavior gives important information on the relation of the optical characteristics to the composite micro-structure.