Owing to its well-known chemical stability, thermal stability, and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process compatibility, titanium nitride (TiN) has recently been demonstrated as an excellent alternative plasmonic material for noble metals. However, the lack of systematic studies on its electromagnetic enhancement mechanism has placed an obstacle on the realization of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) using this unique TiN substrate for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) applications. In this study, we prepared TiN nanorods using scalable high-throughput oblique angle deposition technique and optimized its SERS effect by improving the crystallinity via annealing. Remarkably, we directly observed the LSPR of the TiN nanorods by near-field optical image and revealed its corresponding LSPR mode using finite element analysis. The two resonance peaks in both near and far field exhibit a red shift when increasing the length of the TiN nanorods, which can be ascribed to the increase of electron cloud oscillation distance with the same electron mobility. Therefore, our systematical investigations have clarified the critical influences of both the crystallinity and the length on the LSPR of TiN nanorods, thus providing urgently required guidance for TiN SERS substrate design, as well as LSPR device development.

Magnetic skyrmions have gained unprecedented attention for their potential applications in spintronic devices, such as non‐volatile memory, energy‐efficient, and non‐von Neumann devices. In particular, skyrmions in synthetic antiferromagnets (SAF) are believed to overcome the fundamental limitations of the widely studied ferromagnetic skyrmions in terms of size and effective current‐induced manipulation. Recently, several methods have been proposed to stabilize SAF skyrmions, however, the controllable creation and manipulation of skyrmions in SAF remains a challenge. Here, the generation, manipulation, and current‐driven dynamics of SAF skyrmions are studied by a thermal induced integrated device. The thermal created SAF skyrmion provides a prerequisite for the subsequent current‐driven dynamics research where apparent inhibition of skyrmion Hall effect is observed due to the effectively compensated topological charge. In addition, by tuning the heating current, the density of skyrmions in SAF can be effectively manipulated, which is a key factor for utilizing SAF skyrmions toward practical spintronic devices.

V-shaped AgNRs have a higher SERS sensitivity than straight AgNRs and their resonance wavelengths can be tuned linearly.

Simultaneously increasing electric conductance and optical transmission represents a key challenge for developing a high-quality transparent metallic film (TMF). Using nanosphere lithography and oblique angle deposition, we show that large-area silver nanograting (NG) on nanohole (NH) structures can meet this challenge. The fabricated NG–NH hybrid structure exhibits an excellent sheet resistance as low as 4.53 Ω/sq, an optical transmission of 75.4% from visible to near-infrared, and a high Haacke number up to 13.1, which is superior to that of previously reported metal NH networks or TMFs. Both the electric conductance and optical transparency are anisotropic and can be tuned by the NH diameter, lattice spacing, and the polarization of incident light. In particular, the transparency wavelength bands for different polarized lights are significantly different, which can be used for dual functionalities. The anisotropic electronic property is explained by a two-dimensional resistor network model, and the observed optical responses match well with the results from finite-difference time-domain calculations.