Experimental and computational investigation on the surface plasmon resonance of copper thin-films produced via pulsed laser deposition

Copper thin-films were produced on dielectric substrates by pulsed laser deposition. Different morphologies and optical absorption behaviors, most of them corresponding to films above the percolation threshold, were obtained while varying the parameters of the laser deposition. The optical properties, in particular the surface plasmon resonance of the thin-films, are discussed in the framework of the discrete dipole approximation and the method of moments, which provide an alternative to the usually cumbersome Maxwell-Garnett theory. Experimental results obtained from copper thin-films produced via pulsed laser deposition support the computational findings. It is found that the aforementioned computational methods provide a reasonable qualitative fit to the experimental data.