Structure and Optical Property Prediction of 2D Plasmonic Photonic Crystals Fabricated by Shadow Sphere Lithography

Shadow sphere lithography (SSL) is a powerful and large-scale fabrication method to produce two-dimensional (2D) plasmonic photonic crystals and three-dimensional metamaterials. Practically, one of the biggest challenges for SSL-based fabrications is that it is hard to accurately predict the physical properties of the fabricated nanostructures if the structures were only modeled by the geometric shadowing effect. A Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is developed to show that the dynamic shadowing effect due to the accumulation of materials on the template as well as the thin-film growth mechanism plays a key role in determining the structure details. For a one-to-three step-based SSL fabrication, the nanostructures predicted by MC match very well with those produced experimentally, and the plasmonic properties predicted by these MC-simulated structures are also consistent with the features obtained experimentally, both qualitative and semi-quantitative. This study indicates a possible solution to use MC simulation and numerical calculation to guide the design of the plasmonic photonic crystals and metamaterials based on SSL for optic applications.