Examining the Performance of Refractory Conductive Ceramics as Plasmonic Materials: A Theoretical Approach

By Mukesh Kumar, N. Umezawa, Satoshi Ishii, Tadaaki Nagao. 2015

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The main aim of this study is to scrutinize promising plasmonic materials by understanding their electronic structure and correlating them to the optical properties of selected refractory materials. For this purpose, the electronic and optical properties of the conductive ceramics TiC, ZrC, HfC, TaC, WC, TiN, ZrN, HfN, TaN, and WN are studied systematically by means of first-principles density functional theory. A full ab initio procedure to calculate plasma frequency from the electronic band structure is discussed. The dielectric functions are calculated by including electronic interband and intraband transitions. Our calculations confirm that transition metal nitrides, such as TiN, ZrN, and HfN, are the strongest candidates, exhibiting performance comparable to that of conventional noble metals in the visible to the near-infrared regions. On the other hand, carbides are not suitable for plasmonic applications because they show very large losses in the same regions. From our calculated dielectric functio...

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2c0d8e6d102710284c748e827768c274c646d7c