Ultra-thin deposition of Au layers

Supervisors:

Radu Malureanu: rmal@fotonik.dtu.dk

Electromagnetic metamaterials are artificial media manufactured using nano-/micro-fabrication techniques. They are useful for designing the electromagnetic space and, through it, control the light propagation. These materials exhibit properties that are rarely, or even never, observed in nature.

A special type of metamaterial is the hyperbolic metamaterial. They have properties extremely different in one direction of the material compared with another thus making them very interesting to study. Such properties are obtained by, for example, having multiple layers of metals and dielectrics.

Experimentally, these structures are difficult to obtain due to the very low critical dimensions they require. Thus, the theory allows for structuring at the level of a few nanometres but not much higher than that.

This project aims at developing the first step in fabricating such metamaterials, namely the deposition of very thin metallic layers. Due to their optical properties, the best metals to be used in building hyperbolic metamaterials are gold and silver. We will be concentrating our efforts on gold.

The target is to obtain thin continuous layers of Au having less than 6nm thickness. Using sputtering techniques (at DTU Danchip) you will investigate the deposition parameters such that to obtain the smoothest thin layer possible. The inspection of the layer’s quality will be done using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques