Supersaturation-Driven Optical Tuning of Ag Nanocomposite Glasses for Photonics: An In Situ Optical Microspectroscopy Study

Abstract

Silver nanoparticle (NP) precipitation in a meltquenched aluminophosphate glass matrix has been studied and compared for 8 mol% and 4 mol% concentrations of both Ag 2 O and SnO dopants. The assessment is carried out by monitoring the plasmonic evolution of glass-embedded Ag NPs in real time during thermal treatments by in situ optical microspectroscopy and complemented by transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction characterization. The time variation in the surface plasmon resonance of Ag NPs is analyzed in the framework of Mie extinction theory in connection with nanocrystal precipitation in the supersaturated solid solutions. For the higher concentration of silver and tin, nucleation and growth processes were distinguished, which appeared to be temperature-and time-dependent. Hence, favorable conditions were induced for the precipitation of a large amount of small NPs in the system. On the other hand, the nucleation and growth stages were not well separated in time for the lower concentration of dopants, resulting in Ag NPs of a broad size range. However, such less-concentrated nanocomposite allowed for the precipitation of NPs much larger than those observed for the 8% doped glass. Varying the degree of supersaturation in the system has been established as an important means for the tuning of material optical properties for photonic (nanoplasmonic) applications.

Optical Properties of Eu3+-Doped Aluminophosphate Glass with a High Concentration of Silver and Tin

“…The fact that the SPR peak is situated consistently not presenting any signiicant red shifts is in agreement with NP precipitation within the dipole regime of Mie theory, i.e. Ag particles with radii smaller than 10 nm are developed [30]. The higher temperature seems to support a higher density of NPs as inferred from the relatively higher optical densities achieved.…”

“…Although some studies have shown that nonplasmonic metal clusters can serve as sensitizers of rareearth ions [20,21], an enhanced Eu 3+ PL was not detected in this work. This is likely due to the vigorous NP precipitation induced by the relatively high degree of supersaturation of the redox reactants [30] leading to the Eu 3+ → Ag NP energy transfer being dominant [14,20,21]. In Fig.…”

Kinetics of copper nanoparticle precipitation in phosphate glass: an isothermal plasmonic approach

“…Hence, no Ostwald ripening is expected in this glass system. 33 Therefore, nucleation and diffusion-based growth are the two microscopic mechanisms naturally leading to the decrease in supersaturation, and copper precipitation in its final form of spherical NPs. As the in situ collected extinction spectra suggested, the isothermal precipitation can be discussed as two stage process: pre-plasmonic (atomic clusters, prior to the appearance of the SPR) and plasmonic phase (larger, plasmonic NPs).…”

Synthesis of optical waveguides in SiO2 by silver ion implantation

“…The field includes the physics of the implantation process itself, the materials science of the optical oxides and their structure-property relationships, and also the area of modern photonics [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Furthermore, heavy ion implantation (i.e. Ag, Cu, Au) in optical materials has promising nonlinear optical properties for advanced photonic applications [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, there are only a few reports of optical waveguides obtained by metal ion implantation [13][14][15].…”