Reduced optical losses in refractory plasmonic titanium nitride thin films deposited with molecular beam epitaxy

Refractory plasmonic materials that have optical properties close to those of noble-metals and at the same time are environmentally friendly, commercially viable and CMOS-compatible could lead to novel devices for many thermo-photonic applications. Recently developed TiN thin films overcome some of the limitations of noble-metals, as their optical loss is larger than noble metals and conventional methods to deposit TiN films are not compatible for its integration with other semiconductors. In this work, high-quality epitaxial single-crystalline TiN thin films are deposited with plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) that exhibit optical losses that are less than that of Au in most part of the visible (300 nm - 580 nm) and near-IR spectral ranges (1000 nm - 25(X) nm). In addition, a large figure-of-merit fbr surface plasmon polariton (SPP) propagation length compared to the previously reported TiN films is achieved with the MBE-deposited films. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement