Analysis of localized surface plasmon resonances in gold nanoparticles surrounded by copper oxides

Abstract

Au-doped Cu thin films are produced by co-deposition of Au and Cu via radiofrequency magnetron sputtering in a vacuum chamber with a base pressure of 1 × 10−7 mbar. After post annealing in a furnace with air, one may obtain either Au-Cu2O or Au-CuO nanocomposite thin films. The presence of Au does not have any considerable influence on the position of the optical band gap of the oxides. Only the Au-CuO system shows well-formed localized surface plasmonic resonances with Gaussian shape. We study systematically the plasmonic behavior of the nanocomposites as a function of the gold concentration, annealing time, and film thickness. The intensity of the resonances, their position, and width are intensely affected by all these parameters. The experimental results are compared with respect to rigorous theoretical calculations. The similarities and differences between experiment and theory are discussed.

Calculation of the Localized Surface Plasmon Resonances of Au Nanoparticles Embedded in NiO

“…The advantage of applying the RCWA method over other computational methods is its ability to efficiently handle very large objects that have the same cross section along the z-axis. In RCWA, cubes and cylinders having their axis along the z axis can be effectively treated using almost the same computational time regardless of their length while methods such as the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) or Finite Element (FE) need to increase their mesh linearly as length increases in order to keep the computational time reduced [20].…”