Contact
Radu Malureanu: rmal@fotonik.dtu.dk
Andrei Lavrinenko: alav@fotonik.dtu.dk
This project aims at developing a very thin and stable Ag/Al layer to be used for metamaterials fabrication.
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.
Nowadays, the best theoretical metal to be used is Ag. However, it has the huge disadvantage of very high reactivity thus oxidising extremely fast and losing its metallic properties. Initial studies show that, by combining Ag with Al, another good metal for metamaterials, the advantages of Ag can be held while limiting its oxidation speed. The target is to obtain thin continuous Ag/Al layers with different Al concentration using sputtering techniques (at DTU Nanolab). Afterwards, the layers will be morphologically characterised both in terms of smoothness, thickness as well as Al concentration in the depth and stability in time. The inspection of the layer’s quality will be done using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) as well and X-ray reflectometry (XRR) techniques
