Impact of nonlocal response in plasmonic metasurfaces on four-wave mixing

We report the impact of nonlocal response in metallic nanostructures on four-wave mixing (FWM) process in nonlinear plasmonic metasurfaces which consist of Au nanostrips coupled with Au film spaced by an ultrathin dielectric film. When the dielectric film is linear and FWM only from the Au nanostructures, the FWM efficiency of around two orders of magnitude enhancement is obtained when the nonlocal effect of Au, not the traditionally local Drude model of Au, is considered. However, when the dielectric film is nonlinear and FWM from the Au nanostructures is negligible, the almost half FWM response from the nonlinear metasurface under the nonlocal, not the local model, of Au is confirmed. These results are both ascribed to the different local electric field distributions near the surface of Au nanostructures and in the gap at the local and nonlocal response of Au. The results have an important significance to design ultra-compacted integrated nonlinear optical devices or to explain the experimental measurements of nonlinear response involving plasmonic nanostructures of ultra-small gaps.

Dielectric Film Thickness Measurement Via a Convolutional Neural Network for Integrated Circuit Delayering End Point Detection

The integrated circuit (IC) delayering workflow is heavily reliant on operator experience to determine the processing end point, which is the ideal point on an IC where processing should be terminated, to optimize region of interest imaging. The current method of end point detection during IC delayering utilizes qualitative correlation between dielectric film color and dielectric thickness observed via optical microscopy to guide decision making. The goal of this work is to quantify this relationship using computer vision. In the field of computer vision, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to capture spatial relationships within images. Given this success, a CNN was trained for thickness estimates of dielectric films using optical images captured during processing for eventual automated end point detection. The trained model explained 39% of the variance in dielectric film thickness with a mean absolute error of approximately 47 nm.

Theoretical Study on Metasurfaces for Transverse Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect Enhancement of Ultra-Thin Magnetic Dielectric Films

We study how to enhance the transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect (TMOKE) of ultra-thin magnetic dielectric films through the excitation of strong magnetic resonances on metasurface with a metal nanowire array stacked above a metal substrate with an ultra-thin magnetic dielectric film spacer. The plasmonic hybridizations between the Au nanowires and substrate result in magnetic resonances. The periodic arrangement of the Au nanowires can excite propagating surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) on the metal surface. When the SPPs and the magnetic resonances hybridize, they can strongly couple to form two strong magnetic resonances, which are explained by a coupled oscillator model. Importantly, benefitting from the strong magnetic resonances, we can achieve a large TMOKE signal up to 26% in the ultra-thin magnetic dielectric film with a thickness of only 30 nm, which may find potential applications in nanophotonics, magnonics, and spintronics.