Strongly enhanced sensitivities of CMOS compatible plasmonic titanium nitride nanohole arrays for refractive index sensing under oblique incidence

Titanium nitride (TiN) is a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible material with large potential for the fabrication of plasmonic structures suited for device integration. However, the comparatively large optical losses can be detrimental for application. This work reports a CMOS compatible TiN nanohole array (NHA) on top of a multilayer stack for potential use in integrated refractive index sensing with high sensitivities at wavelengths between 800 and 1500 nm. The stack, consisting of the TiN NHA on a silicon dioxide (SiO2) layer with Si as substrate (TiN NHA/SiO2/Si), is prepared using an industrial CMOS compatible process. The TiN NHA/SiO2/Si shows Fano resonances in reflectance spectra under oblique excitation, which are well reproduced by simulation using both finite difference time domain (FDTD) and rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) methods. The sensitivities derived from spectroscopic characterizations increase with the increasing incident angle and match well with the simulated sensitivities. Our systematic simulation-based investigation of the sensitivity of the TiN NHA/SiO2/Si stack under varied conditions reveals that very large sensitivities up to 2305 nm per refractive index unit (nm RIU-1) are predicted when the refractive index of superstrate is similar to that of the SiO2 layer. We analyze in detail how the interplay between plasmonic and photonic resonances such as surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs), Rayleigh Anomalies (RAs), and photonic microcavity modes (Fabry-Perot resonances) contributes to this result. This work not only reveals the tunability of TiN nanostructures for plasmonic applications but also paves the way to explore efficient devices for sensing in broad conditions.

Automated summary

This research presents a CMOS compatible TiN nanohole array on top of a multilayer stack, which allows for high sensitivity refractive index sensing in the range of 800 to 1500 nm. The TiN nanohole array is fabricated using an industrial CMOS compatible process and shows Fano resonances under oblique excitation. Simulation results and spectroscopic characterizations match well, indicating the potential for efficient devices in sensing applications.