Plasmonic properties of implanted Ag nanoparticles in SiO2 thin layer by spectroscopic ellipsometry

We report an uncommon study of the insertion of distributions of both volume fraction and depolarization factors in the modeling of the plasmonic properties of implanted Ag nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) in a SiO2 layer when using spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) characterization. The Ag-NPs were embedded in the SiO2 matrix by Ag+ ion implantation at various doses of 0.5 × 1016, 1 × 1016, 2 × 1016, and 5 × 1016 ions cm−2. The formation of the Ag-NPs in a host matrix of SiO2 was controlled by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The Ag-NPs are self-organized in the layer, and their mean radius ranges between 2 and 20 nm. The optical properties of layers were extracted by modeling the SE parameters by taking into account the depth profile concentration of Ag-NPs. The mixture of SiO2 and Ag-NP inclusions was modeled as an effective medium according to the shape distributed effective medium theory (SDEMT). In addition to the optical responses, it is shown that this model enables the explanation of the impact of NP ...