A thin film comprising parallel tilted nanorods was deposited by directing silver vapor obliquely towards a plane substrate. The reflection and transmission coefficients of the thin film were measured at three wavelengths in the visible regime for normal-illumination conditions, using ellipsometry and walk-off interferometry. The thin film was found to display a negative real refractive index. Since vapor deposition is a well-established industrial technique to deposit thin films, this finding is promising for large-scale production of negatively refracting metamaterials.

In this work, one-step glancing angle deposition is utilized to fabricate gold and silver nanohelix arrays (NHAs) on smooth glass substrates. During deposition, the substrate is cooled using liquid nitrogen and rotated with a tunable spin rate. The substrate spin rate is tuned to match the deposition rate to yield a spiral-like helix structure. The morphologies and optical properties of spiral-like Ag and Au NHAs are measured and compared. The polarization-dependent reflectance of Au NHA leads to a strong g-factor. The three-dimensional nanohelical structures are demonstrated to be a highly sensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate.

A normalized admittance diagram assists in describing and designing multilayered structures to excite long-range surface-plasmon-polariton (LRSPP) waves of either the p- or the s-polarization state. These structures comprise symmetric periodic multilayers on one or both sides of a metal thin film in either the Kretschmann or the Sarid configuration. The normalized admittance diagram even assists in designing structures that can be used to excite LRSPP waves of both polarization states simultaneously.

Gold nanohelix arrays (NHAs) were fabricated on a smooth glass substrate using glancing angle deposition technique. At a deposition angle of 89°, gold NHAs were fabricated by introducing liquid nitrogen to flow under the backside of BK7 glass substrate holder to reduce the temperature of substrate to be around −140 °C under deposition. The spin rate was controlled with respect to the deposition rate to grow three different sized nanohelices. The morphology and optical properties were measured and compared for the three samples. In application, the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) from each three-dimensional NHA was measured and analyzed with near field simulation.

A multilayer narrow bandpass filter that consists of silver and silicon thin films is designed using the admittance tracing method. Owing to the low loss of silicon in the infrared range, the peak transmittance at a wavelength of 950 nm exceeds 85%. To eliminate the sidebands that are adjacent to the passband, a compact four-layered structure is proposed to generate an angle-insensitive spectrum. In fabrication, a silver-silicon multilayer is deposited to approach the design.