Part of the book: Selected Topics on Optical Fiber Technology
The author has been engaged in the development of a novel optical fiber probe using scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) with an efficient, plasmonic and asymmetric Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) structure at the probe tip. As a metallic layer, titanium nitride (TiN), one of the alternative plasmonic materials, is selected. A pulsed laser deposition (PLD) is used to fabricate the film by high-power Nd:YAG laser. The PLDed films have been analyzed by X-ray diffractometer (XRD), UV-Vis/NIR spectrophotometer, scanning electron microscope (SEM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Though most of previous PLD studies of TiN film used a titanium target with reactive gases, the study presented in this chapter has significant features of (1) a hot pressed target of crystalline TiN powder and (2) third harmonic of injection-seeded Nd:YAG laser which have temporally smoothed Gaussian with a constant pulse energy. The very first PLD process has succeeded to fabricate flat and dense films of a few hundred nanometers. The TiN film, which lustered like gold, indicated two peaks at 36.7° (111) and 42.6° (200) in XRD patterns that correspond to crystal structure of TiN. An elementary analysis of the TiN film has carried out using XPS, and appropriate spectra with chemical shifts were observed.
Part of the book: Nanoplasmonics