Engineering electronic and plasmonic materials for novel photonic devices

Abstract

In the last decade well known materials such as metals and silicon have emerged as new materials for photonic applications leading to the growth of two important fields: plasmonics and silicon photonics. This thesis is divided in two parts with part I focusing on plasmonics, and silicon photonics are the target of part II. Novel substrates exploiting plasmonic effects are currently the subject of extensive research in areas such as biological sensing, medicine, optical microscopy and nanophotonics. Here a new class of silver impregnated polycarbonate substrates will be presented. The fabrication process using a supercritical impregnation technique will be described and the substrates morphologically characterised before being tested for Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy and Metal Enhanced Fluorescence. These substrates exhibit an excellent plasmonic response and benefit from being flexible, robust, inexpensive and biocompatible. The demonstrated ability of post processing the nanocomposites provides an additional degree of design control for a wide range of applications. In part II semiconductor modified microstructured optical fibres (MOFs) will be presented. The combination of semiconductor materials within microstructured optical fibres can lead to highly engineerable devices with wide control over both photonic and electronic properties for both linear and non-linear photonic applications. The presented fabrication process consists of a high pressure chemical vapour deposition method which allows for conformal inclusion of materials such as silicon and germanium within the extremely high aspect ratio pores of MOFs. The deposited material is structurally characterised using SEM, TEM and Raman spectroscopy demonstrating good quality amorphous and polycrystalline growth. The project then focuses on investigating the use of these fibres for silicon photonics applications. Loss measurements performed on a range of samples reveal transmission losses potentially compatible with a wide range of non-linear photonic devices

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ORCID for P.J.A. Sazio: orcid.org/0000-0002-6506-9266

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