Plasmonic properties of implanted Ag nanoparticles in SiO2 thin layer by spectroscopic ellipsometry

Abstract

We report an uncommon study of the insertion of distributions of both volume fraction and depolarization factors in the modeling of the plasmonic properties of implanted Ag nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) in a SiO2 layer when using spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) characterization. The Ag-NPs were embedded in the SiO2 matrix by Ag+ ion implantation at various doses of 0.5 × 1016, 1 × 1016, 2 × 1016, and 5 × 1016 ions cm−2. The formation of the Ag-NPs in a host matrix of SiO2 was controlled by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The Ag-NPs are self-organized in the layer, and their mean radius ranges between 2 and 20 nm. The optical properties of layers were extracted by modeling the SE parameters by taking into account the depth profile concentration of Ag-NPs. The mixture of SiO2 and Ag-NP inclusions was modeled as an effective medium according to the shape distributed effective medium theory (SDEMT). In addition to the optical responses, it is shown that this model enables the explanation of the impact of NP shape distribution on the plasmon band and provides precious information about the NP shape characteristics. A good agreement was obtained between ellipsometry and TEM results. The distribution of the volume fraction in the film was found to lead to a gradient of effective dielectric function which was determined by the SDEMT model. The effective dielectric function reveals distinct Ag plasmon resonance varying as the Ag+ ions dose is varied. The real part of the dielectric function shows a significant variation around the plasmon resonance in accordance with the Kramers-Kronig equations. All determined optical parameters by SDEMT are provided and discussed. We highlight that SE combined with SDEMT calculations can be considered as a reliable tool for the determination of the NP shape and volume fraction distributions without the need of TEM.