Highly sensitive optically tunable transition metal nitride-based plasmonic pressure sensor with CMOS-compatibility at compact subwavelength dimensions

Abstract

This article presents a novel transition metal nitride (TMN)-based plasmonic pressure sensor (PPS) that utilizes a TMN-insulator-TMN structure. Our proposed sensor is built with zirconium nitride (ZrN), an alternative plasmonic material that provides several benefits over conventional plasmonic metals like silver and gold. Notably, ZrN is compatible with standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and it offers tunability of optical properties. The sensor demonstrates a maximum pressure sensitivity of 177.56 nm/MPa with a resolution of 5.63 × 10-6 MPa. Furthermore, the incorporation of TMN endows the PPS with several beneficial characteristics, such as exceptional hardness, high-temperature thermal stability, optical tunability, and lower electrical resistivity which are typically absent in conventional plasmonic noble metals, limiting their practical application in plasmonic devices. Consequently, our proposed configuration outperforms the conventional noble material-based metal-insulator-metal (MIM) configuration, which removes the barriers to wide-scale adaptations of plasmonic devices by paving the way for the research and development of efficient, robust, and long-lasting sensors at subwavelength scales, thereby forging a link between nanoelectronics and plasmonics.