Plasmonic and Superconducting Self-Assembled MBE Grown Indium Islands

Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) grown metal has been a renewed area of interest recently in order to achieve high quality metal films or nanostructures for plasmonics. Recently MBE grown silver films have been shown to possess optical constants closer to that of intrinsic silver leading to lower losses and thus allowing for higher quality plasmonics. MBE has also been used to grow silver nanocrystals and indium droplets, or islands, for plasmonics. These self-assembled nanostructures can be grown in close proximity to quantum confined structures such as InAs/GaAs quantum dots or InGaAs/GaAs quantum wells in a single process, without post-processing and fabrication, allowing for increased plasmonic enhancement due to the improved interface between the semiconductor and plasmonic structures.;In this dissertation, widely tunable plasmonic resonances of indium islands will be discussed and plasmonic enhancement results will be presented and compared to those of nanoantennas constructed from standard fabrication processes. The coupling between near-surface quantum confined structures, both fabricated and self-assembled, will be compared to the coupling in typical dielectric cavities, such as photonic crystal nanobeams. Beyond the plasmonic possibilities of indium islands, indium becomes superconducting at 3.4 K. With the proximity effect allowing for electrons in materials in contact with a superconductor to occupy a superconducting like state, allowing for the possibility for a hybrid superconductor/semiconductor optical source. The observation of superconductivity in indium islands will be presented and considerations for a superconductor/semiconductor source will be discussed.