Indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films were grown on nanopatterned glass substrates by the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. The deposition was carried out at 1.2 J/cm2 laser fluence, low oxygen pressure (1.5 Pa) and on unheated substrate. Arrays of periodic pillars with widths of ~350 nm, heights of ~250 nm, and separation pitches of ~1100 nm were fabricated on glass substrates using UV nanoimprint lithography (UV-NIL), a simple, cost-effective, and high throughput technique used to fabricate nanopatterns on large areas. In order to emphasize the influence of the periodic patterns on the properties of the nanostructured ITO films, this transparent conductive oxide (TCO) was also grown on flat glass substrates. Therefore, the structural, compositional, morphological, optical, and electrical properties of both non-patterned and patterned ITO films were investigated in a comparative manner. The energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) confirms that the ITO films preserve the In2O3:SnO2 weight ratio from the solid ITO target. The SEM and atomic force microscopy (AFM) images prove that the deposited ITO films retain the pattern of the glass substrates. The optical investigations reveal that patterned ITO films present a good optical transmittance. The electrical measurements show that both the non-patterned and patterned ITO films are characterized by a low electrical resistivity (<2.8 × 10−4). However, an improvement in the Hall mobility was achieved in the case of the nanopatterned ITO films, evidencing the potential applications of such nanopatterned TCO films obtained by PLD in photovoltaic and light emitting devices.
This study presents the design and manufacture of metasurface lenses optimized for focusing light with 1.55 µm wavelength. The lenses are fabricated on silicon substrates using electron beam lithography, ultraviolet-nanoimprint lithography and cryogenic deep reactive-ion etching techniques. The designed metasurface makes use of the geometrical phase principle and consists of rectangular pillars with target dimensions of height h = 1200 nm, width w = 230 nm, length l = 354 nm and periodicity p = 835 nm. The simulated efficiency of the lens is 60%, while the master lenses obtained by using electron beam lithography are found to have an efficiency of 45%. The lenses subsequently fabricated via nanoimprint are characterized by an efficiency of 6%; the low efficiency is mainly attributed to the rounding of the rectangular nanostructures during the pattern transfer processes from the resist to silicon due to the presence of a thicker residual layer.