Silver glass nano composites fabricated using argon implantation

Glasses enriched with noble metal nanoparticles (Ag, Au, Cu) are considered as excellent candidates for the fabrication of ultrafast optical switches, optical sensors and waveguides which are of great importance in opto-electronic and photonic devices. In the present work silver glass nanocomposites were fabricated by Ag⁺ - Na⁺ ion-exchange method followed by 200 keV Ar⁺ ion implantation at oblique incidences of 30°, 40° and 50° with a dose of 5 × 10¹⁶ ions cm^-2. Thus fabricated nanocomposites were further characterized using field emission electron microscopy (FESEM) along with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDAX) and UV-visible spectroscopy in transmission mode. The transmission spectra reveal that there is a narrow band around 342 nm in UV region for the nanocomposites which is absent in case of virgin glass and can be of significant importance from the perspective of UV based narrow band pass filters. When the dose of incident Ar⁺ ions was increased then transmission intensity decreased from 54.4% to 29.4% at 342 nm and in addition FWHM also showed a decrease from 48.8 nm to 38.7 nm for the nanocomposites with same doses. (author)