Fabrication of Plasmonic Indium Tin Oxide Nanoparticles by Means of a Gas Aggregation Cluster Source

ACS Omega. 2023 Feb 1;8(6):6052-6058. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.2c08070. eCollection 2023 Feb 14.

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, the possibility to fabricate indium tin oxide nanoparticles (ITO NPs) using a gas aggregation cluster source. A stable and reproducible deposition rate of ITO NPs has been achieved using magnetron sputtering of an In2O3/SnO2 target (90/10 wt %) at an elevated pressure of argon. Remarkably, most of the generated NPs possess a crystalline structure identical to the original target material, which, in combination with their average size of 17 nm, resulted in a localized surface plasmon resonance peak at 1580 nm in the near-infrared region.