Scientific blog
Silver nanoparticles deposition 
Tuesday, 4 December, 2012, 18:52
Posted by Zbigniew Starowicz
Silver nanoparticles are key building blocks of my plasmonic structure. This choice was made because of simulation results and literature survey. Required concentration of silver nanoparticles is about ten to the power of nine per centimeter squared. The Basic difficulty is fabrication of such densely packed nanoparticles array.

Previous method used for that purpose was the multiple spin coating with injecting colloidal solution onto spinning wafer. Unfortunatelly maximal obtained concentration was of order of 10^7 particles per squared centimeter. Most commonly used method is thermal evaporation of thin silver layer(over a dozen nm) followed by annealing, which result in formation of hemispherical silver nano islands.

Due to the lack of proper facilities for thin layer deposition this stage was replaced by electroless silver deposition method commonly used for mirrors manufacturing. Silver deposition occurs on either silicon and titanium dioxide substrate. Obtained layer was annealed at the temperature of 200 Celsius for one hour in the innert atmosphere. Creation of silver nano islands was confirmed by SEM. Unluckily due to the inhomogenity and lack of thickness control this method cannot be used for further investigations.

Better precision is expected with photochemical deposition.
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