Fabrication of Plasmonic Indium Tin Oxide Nanoparticles by Means of a Gas Aggregation Cluster Source

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, the possibility to fabricate indium tin oxide nanoparticles (ITO NPs) using a gas aggregation cluster source. A stable and reproducible deposition rate of ITO NPs has been achieved using magnetron sputtering of an In2O3/SnO2 target (90/10 wt %) at an elevated pressure of argon. Remarkably, most of the generated NPs possess a crystalline structure identical to the original target material, which, in combination with their average size of 17 nm, resulted in a localized surface plasmon resonance peak at 1580 nm in the near-infrared region.

Challenges in the deposition of plasma polymer nanoparticles using gas aggregation source: Rebounding upon impact and how to land them on a substrate

“…Because of this, there is a huge number of publications concerning the description of the aggregation sources, theories of nanoparticle formation and growth, particle properties, and so on. [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] The vast majority of this work is, however, oriented on the study of the production of metal or metal oxide particles (for review see, e.g., [34][35][36] ) and there have been only a few papers (e.g., [37][38][39][40][41][42][43] ) investigating the potential of gas aggregation sources to produce polymer or plasma polymer NPs (pp-NPs). There are, of course, other methods to produce such particles (e.g., techniques based on the dusty plasma, [44,45] atmospheric pressure plasma sources, [46] or NPs production without the gas aggregation source in a vacuum chamber [47] ), but the use of the gas aggregation sources has several undisputable advantages including directionality of deposition and advanced control over pp-NPs size.…”