The Influence of the Multiple Scattering on the Optical Properties of Ag-poly(p-xylylene) Composite Coating

Roman Puzko,Anton Mikhailitsyn,Alexander Merzlikin,Alexey Gusev,Alexey Glushchenkov,Ilya Ryzhikov,Yuri Trofimov,Karen Mailyan,Vitally Tsvirka,Artem Vdovichenko

doi:10.3390/coatings10100976

Abstract

The creation of composite coatings with assigned optical properties is an important problem of modern science and technology. We have considered the metal-polymer nanocomposites based on poly(p-xylylene), with various concentrations of plasmon components—silver nanoparticles. We have carried out the optical measurements of the reflection, transmission, scattering and absorption coefficients for the manufactured films. We have retrieved the effective optical parameters of the composite coatings. The theoretical estimations based on the scattering and absorption data show that the scattering effectively occurs on the clusters of metal nanoparticles. This significantly influences the optical properties of the composite coating.

Highlights

The design and manufacturing of composite materials with unique physical and chemical properties are of great interest to the scientific community [1,2]
The manufacturing process of a PPX composite coating with immersed silver particles is the cryochemical polymerization of PPX in vacuum with the simultaneous deposition of silver particles
The initial stage of the process is the sublimation of the cyclic dimer of p-xylylene (CDPX)

Summary

Introduction

The design and manufacturing of composite materials with unique physical and chemical properties are of great interest to the scientific community [1,2]. The metal-polymer composites are the prospective composite materials. Their microstructure is a dielectric matrix with metal inclusions. The metal-polymer composites show a number of unusual physical properties [3,4,5,6,7]. The nanocomposite properties significantly depend on the concentration, size and shape of metal inclusions. The positions and shapes of boundaries between the structural components noticeably influence the material properties. The choice of metal component allows the additional tuning of composite properties. The metal-polymer composites with the immersed plasmonic nanoparticles have great potential for the applications: plasmonic metals are widely used for various purposes, such as on-chip optical devices [8], sensors with high sensitivity [9,10] and surface plasmon-polaritons lasers [11]

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Results

Conclusion