Abstract
We introduce a new two-step method to fabricate silver-silicon gratings that can excite surface plasmons efficiently. The grating structure was firstly created on a flat silicon substrate by single-pulse nanosecond laser interference lithography. Next, a silver layer of 50 nm was evaporated on the silicon substrate. With proper laser energy, a silver-silicon grating with a period of 1120 nm and depth of 18 nm was successfully fabricated. This grating can produce high-quality surface plasmon resonance (SPR) peaks at various incident angles. Moreover, a SPR sensor was experimentally demonstrated based on the silver-silicon grating, which had high sensitivity of 961.5 nm/RIU and figure of merit of 60. Our method is an efficient way to fabricate periodically nanostructured metals at high speed and low cost.
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Funding
This study received supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61605067), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JUSRP51721B), and Jiangsu Provincial Research Center of Light Industrial Optoelectronic Engineering and Technology (BM2014402).
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Wang, Q., Zheng, Y., Yu, C. et al. Fabrication of Silver-Silicon Gratings for Surface Plasmon Excitation Using Nanosecond Laser Interference Lithography. Plasmonics 15, 1639–1644 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-020-01183-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-020-01183-x