Nanostructure porous films with arrays of gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) have been produced by pulsed laser deposition. Dispersion properties of surface plasmons have been studied by the modulation-polarization spectroscopy technique. The dispersion relations for radiative modes and two types of non-radiative modes of localized and propagating surface plasmons were obtained. The branches of propagating modes were characterized by negative group velocity caused by spatial dispersion of dielectric function. The propagating modes are caused by dipole-dipole interactions between adjacent Au NPs. The frequencies and relaxation parameters of surface plasmon resonances and the plasma frequencies for Αu NPs were obtained. The relation between the surface plasmon’s properties and formation conditions of films with arrays of Αu NPs is discussed.

Superlattices (SLs) consisting of symmetric layers of GaN and AlN have been investigated. Detailed X-ray diffraction and reflectivity measurements demonstrate that the relaxation of built-up strain in the films generally increases with an increasing number of repetitions; however, an apparent relaxation for subcritical thickness SLs is explained through the accumulation of Nagai tilt at each interface of the SL. Additional atomic force microscopy measurements reveal surface pit densities which appear to correlate with the amount of residual strain in the films along with the appearance of cracks for SLs which have exceeded the critical thickness for plastic relaxation. These results indicate a total SL thickness beyond which growth may be limited for the formation of high-quality coherent crystal structures; however, they may indicate a growth window for the reduction of threading dislocations by controlled relaxation of the epilayers.

Our research was aimed at the study of aluminum films and porous anodic alumina (PAA) films in thin-film РАА/Al structures for optical sensors, based on metal-clad waveguides (MCWG). The results of the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies of the structure of Al films, deposited by DC magnetron sputtering, and of PAA films, formed on them, are presented in this work. The study showed that the structure of the Al films is defined by the deposition rate of aluminum and the thickness of the film. We saw that under anodization in 0.3 M aqueous oxalic acid solution at a voltage of 40 V, the PAA film with a disordered array of pores was formed on aluminum films 200–600 nm thick, which were deposited on glass substrates with an ultra-thin adhesive Nb layer. The research revealed the formation of two differently sized types of pores. The first type of pores is formed on the grain boundaries of aluminum film, and the pores are directed perpendicularly to the surface of aluminum. The second type of pores is formed directly on the grains of aluminum. They are directed perpendicularly to the grain plains. There is a clear tendency to self-ordering in this type of pores.

In this paper, ab initio calculations are used to determine polarization difference in zinc blende (ZB), hexagonal (H) and wurtzite (WZ) AlN-GaN and GaN-InN superlattices. It is shown that a polarization difference exists between WZ nitride compounds, while for H and ZB lattices the results are consistent with zero polarization difference. It is therefore proven that the difference in Berry phase spontaneous polarization for bulk nitrides (AlN, GaN and InN) obtained by Bernardini et al. and Dreyer et al. was not caused by the different reference phase. These models provided absolute values of the polarization that differed by more than one order of magnitude for the same material, but they provided similar polarization differences between binary compounds, which agree also with our ab initio calculations. In multi-quantum wells (MQWs), the electric fields are generated by the well-barrier polarization difference; hence, the calculated electric fields are similar for the three models, both for GaN/AlN and InN/GaN structures. Including piezoelectric effect, which can account for 50% of the total polarization difference, these theoretical data are in satisfactory agreement with photoluminescence measurements in GaN/AlN MQWs. Therefore, the three models considered above are equivalent in the treatment of III-nitride MQWs and can be equally used for the description of the electric properties of active layers in nitride-based optoelectronic devices.