TAILORING THE OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF ALTERNATIVE NANOMATERIALS

Having precise knowledge about the dielectric function of materials is of high importance for the successful development of high-performance plasmonic-based nanophotonic devices. While this essential function is in general constant and well-established for bulk materials, as we approach the ultrathin regime their optical behavior starts to differ from the bulk due to multiple reasons, including grain scattering, crystallinity, surface roughness or quantum effects amongst others. Such differences can be regarded as an experimental problem, but are in fact a source of new opportunities to access exciting ultrathin nanomaterials with tailorable optical properties, which could potentially serve as building blocks for novel nanophotonic devices.

In this work, we present Bismuth (Bi) and Antimony (Sb) ultra thin films prepared by pulsed laser deposition as alternative materials  for nanophotonics, in particular for non-diffractive structural color generation built directly on technologically important substrates, such as Si or Steel.