Ag fractals formed on top of a porous TiO2 thin film

• Autor(a) principal: Borges, Joel Nuno Pinto
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Rodrigues, M. S., Lopes, C., Costa, D., Ferreira, A., Pereira, Rui M. S., Costa, M. F., Vasilevskiy, Mikhail, Vaz, F.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/43375
• topic: Silver fractals; TiO2; Surface Plasmon Resonance; Diffusion-Limited Aggregation; silver; fractals; Ciências Naturais::Ciências Físicas; Science & Technology

This work demonstrates the formation of Ag fractals on top of a Ag:TiO2 thin film. The dendrite-type objects emerged from a homogeneous and highly transparent Ag:TiO2 nanocomposite, via the mechanism of diffusion-limited-aggregation of Ag atoms, during heat-treatment at 500 ºC. A porous TiO2 matrix was also formed during this process, opening a wide range of possible applications, namely in sensing-based ones, together with surface enhanced spectroscopies. Furthermore, fractals incorporate a wide range of shapes and spatial scales, inducing a potentially interesting optical response, over the whole visible range, presumably related with localized surface plasmon modes with very broad spectral distribution.