Influence of the thermal evolution of Au nanoparticles induced by ion implantation on the reflectivity of multilayer structures

The Au/SiO 2 -SiO 2 multilayer periodic structure was fabricated by ion implantation and radio-frequency magnetron sputtering. We proposed a scheme to change the refractive index of the nanocomposite layer based on the important influence of the annealing temperatures on the Au nanoparticles (NPs), and analyzed the changes in the size, volume fraction and dipolar interaction factor of the Au NPs at different temperatures. As a result, the reflectivity of the sample with four periods increased from 65.0% to 82.6% at 800 °C. This method is promising as an application to prepare large-scale photonic integrated circuits as a small size but efficient Bragg reflector.