Metallic Replicas of Photonic Porous Silicon

The current key challenge in fabricating surface plasmon subwavelength photonic materials is achieving precise control of the metal/dielectric interface. To address this problem, this project proposes a novel templating approach to fabricate one-dimensional surface plasmon photonic crystals using sacrificial porous silicon. In particular, porous silicon multilayers can be conveniently fabricated with the porosity profile accurately modulated along the thickness of the film (z-direction). Metal species will then be introduced into the sacrificial porous silicon templates. After the removal of the template by chemical dissolution, the metallic castings will replicate the nanostructure of the master. Thus, the researchers will be able to precisely modulate the metal/dielectric (i.e., metal/air) interface in the fabricated metallic film, which is crucial for achieving the desired photonic properties in the surface plasmon photonic materials.