Pulsed Laser Ablation for Flexible Printed Electronics Applications: Harnessing the Power of Colloidal Nitride Nanoparticles

Nitrides are of the most prominent families of materials dominating nowadays. They can be divided into two distinct sub-categories: i) III-nitride wide-gap semiconductors (GaN, AlN) and ii) Conducting nitrides of IIIb-Vb transition metals (TiN, ZrN, Ti_1-xSc_xN, Ti_1-xTa_xN) that have recently emerged as important plasmonic materials.<br/>Despite the intrinsically superior electrical and optical performance of nitrides compared to conductive oxides, there is a continued and strong prominence of oxides over nitrides in flexible printed electronics due to the compatibility of oxides with solution methods that provide enormous scale up and have allowed oxides to enter the field of printed electronics. The refractory nature of nitrides and the use of high vacuum, introduce industrial costs, reduced scalability and increased power consumption. Therefore, alternative technologies for the fabrication of nitrides are required to be adapted to the needs of printed electronics such as R2R printed sensors and optoelectronic devices.<br/>In this study we propose a radical solution to overcome all the aforementioned obstacles by applying laser fabrication processes that promises to produce colloidal nitride nanoparticles with the desired optoelectrical or plasmonic performance compatible with printed technologies. The colloidal nanoparticles were fabricated through laser ablation of Titanium Nitride (TiN), Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Aluminum Nitride (AlN) thick coatings using a nanosecond Nd:YAG pulsed laser at 355, 532 and 1064 nm wavelengths in various liquids. The colloidal NPs’ structure, morphology as well as quality have been analysed by Raman, SEM, AFM. The optical properties of the target materials have been evaluated by NIR-Vis-UV, Spectroscopic Ellipsometry, while an optical absorbance characterization was performed on the colloidal TiN NPs.