Oxides and nitrides as alternative plasmonic materials in the optical range

TL;DR

This paper reviews alternative plasmonic materials like oxides and nitrides, highlighting their advantages over traditional metals for optical applications, including fabrication, characterization, and potential uses in metamaterials.

Contribution

It provides detailed fabrication and characterization methods for oxides and nitrides as plasmonic materials, assessing their suitability for various optical and metamaterial applications.

Findings

Oxides like Al:ZnO, Ga:ZnO, ITO enable near-IR devices.

Transition-metal nitrides like TiN, ZrN are viable in visible frequencies.

These materials offer low loss and tunability advantages.

Abstract

As alternatives to conventional metals, new plasmonic materials offer many advantages in the rapidly growing fields of plasmonics and metamaterials. These advantages include low intrinsic loss, semiconductor-based design, compatibility with standard nanofabrication processes, tunability, and others. Transparent conducting oxides such as Al:ZnO, Ga:ZnO and indium-tin-oxide (ITO) enable many high-performance metamaterial devices operating in the near-IR. Transition-metal nitrides such as TiN or ZrN can be substitutes for conventional metals in the visible frequencies. In this paper we provide the details of fabrication and characterization of these new materials and discuss their suitability for a number of metamaterial and plasmonic applications.