Fabricating a Dichroic Plasmonic Mirror in Fused Silica by Dual-Ion Implantation

Abstract

We describe a novel ion-implantation method for fabricating a dichroic nanoparticle film by controlling the nucleation and growth of silver nanoparticles in fused silica. We first implant Sc and O ions into the silica substrate to create a high-index layer and modify the shortand intermediate-range order; this dual-implantation technique defines a sharper interface between the silica substrate and the nanoparticle layer. By modifying the shortand intermediate-range order in a thin layer of the silica matrix, Ag ions that are subsequently implanted are subject to altered diffusion and nucleation dynamics, yielding a bilayer structure comprising spatially separated regions of smaller and larger Ag nanoparticles. Depending on the implanted dose of Sc, the peak resonant wavelength in reflectivity can shift as much as 100 nm between front-side (implanted face) and back-side (non-implanted face) illumination. Implications for the optimization of bidirectional optical filters and optical cavities are discussed and compared to calculations of scattering efficiency based on Mie theory.

Collective optical Kerr effect exhibited by an integrated configuration of silicon quantum dots and gold nanoparticles embedded in ion-implanted silica

“…In the cases studied, the formation of distributions with different sizes of Si-QDs can be expected after following a different number of thermal annealing processes, and also due to the dissimilar ion-irradiation energies employed for the implantation in each sample. In addition, we consider that subsequent ion-implantation processes produces additional diffusion and nucleation processes, which can result in changes in the structure, and modification in size of the initially implanted NPs, as it has been previously suggested for dual implantation processes [27].…”