Investigation of nonlinear optical properties on structures of silver micro-flowers

• Published in: Applied physics. A, Materials science & processing Vol. 122; no. 7; pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: Zakaria, R., Mezher, M. H., Chong, W. Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.07.2016
• Subjects: Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Condensed Matter Physics; Deposition; Emerging trends in photo-excitations and promising new laser ablation technologies; Femtosecond; Flowers; Lasers; Machines; Manufacturing; Nanotechnology; Nonlinearity; Optical and Electronic Materials; Optical properties; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Plasmons; Processes; Silver; Surfaces and Interfaces; Thin Films; Nonlinear Refractive Index; Nonlinear Optical Property; Nonlinear Absorption Coefficient; Nonlinear Refraction; Nonlinear Absorption
• ISSN: 0947-8396; 1432-0630
• DOI: 10.1007/s00339-016-0188-3

In this report, we investigated nonlinear optical properties of silver microstructures in flowers like shape (AgMFs). These structures have been fabricated on indium–tin–oxide substrate applying electrochemical deposition technique using three different time depositions of Ag (NH 3 ) 2 OH to produce different sizes of Ag structures in micron scale size. The nonlinear optical property of the material was investigated by a Z -scan technique using femtosecond laser pulses at 800 nm. The AgMFs with higher Ag concentration show a greater enhancement in magnitude and sharpness of the plasmon resonance band. We found out that AgMFs exhibit highly enhanced surface plasmon resonance sensitivity than previous work reported using Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) structures as comparison due to the arbitrarily structures of micro-like flowers. The Z -scan measurement using pulse laser showed that the nonlinear absorption of AgMFs is as high as 3.7 × 10 −9  cm 2  W −1 compared to AgNPs as ~2 × 10 8  cm 2  W −1 .