Spectroscopic study on alternative plasmonic TiN-NRs film prepared by R-HiPIMS with GLAD technique

In this study, we investigate the structural and optical property of alternative plasmonic titanium nitride nanorods (TiN-NRs) films. The TiN-NRs films were deposited by reactive high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (R-HiPIMS) with glancing angle deposition (GLAD) technique at room temperature. The effect of operating pressure on the film crystalline and morphology have been characterized by grazing-incident X-ray diffraction (GIXRD) and field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). The sputtered TiN films contain the nanocolumnar structure with the cubic crystalline structure. The optical property, as well as real and imaginary parts of the dielectric function, were measured by the spectroscopic ellipsometry technique. The atomic concentration and distribution of nitrogen atoms were examined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. In addition, the TiN-NRs films show the great potential of promising in surface-enhanced fluorescence substrate application.