Plasmon enhancement of photosensitivity of Ag–chalcogenide glass thin film structures

In this paper, we present the results of studying the features of plasmon- enhanced photostimulated diffusion of silver into thin films of chalcogenide glasses (ChG), in particular, As 2 S 3 and GeSe 2 . To ensure excitation of surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) at the interface between silver and ChG films, silver diffraction gratings with periods of 899 and 694 nm were used as substrates. The samples were exposed to the p-polarized radiation of a He-Ne laser (λ = 632.8 nm). The radiation of the same laser, attenuated by two orders of magnitude, was used to detect SPP, which enabled to study the kinetics of photostimulated processes in the thin-layer structure of Ag–ChG. It has been established that in the initial period of exposure, the SPP electromagnetic field significantly enhances the photostimulated flux of silver ions in ChG (by 2-3 times). The photodissolution kinetics of Ag in ChG is defined by the features of the granular structure of the investigated thin chalcogenide films. For the GeSe 2 film with the effective thickness 8 nm, the kinetics of the film refractive index increase caused by silver photodoping is well approximated by a logarithmic dependence. For the Ag–As 2 S 3 structure (the effective thickness of the As 2 S 3 film is 14.8 nm), this kinetics is closer to the linear one; moreover, for photodoping without SPP excitation, the kinetics is somewhat superlinear, while with plasmon excitation, it is sublinear. The main physical mechanism responsible for the acceleration of the process of photostimulated diffusion in the structure under study appears to be an accelerated generation of electron-hole pairs, which takes place in the ChG layer near the interface with the metal, where the SPP electromagnetic field strength is maximum, and/or plasmon- assisted hot carrier generation due to plasmon scattering on the surface of the metal film and subsequent internal photoemission of electrons from silver into chalcogenide.