Indeed, Natural Product Library alumina-based waveguides that are very important for optical communications have been developed [11, 12]. Alumina co-doped with Si-ncs and Er3+ ions is more promising than

similarly co-doped silica due to higher solubility of Er3+ ions in alumina host. However, in spite of promising properties, Si-nc-Al2O3 materials were not well addressed. Several approaches have been used to form Si-ncs in amorphous and/or crystalline Al2O3. Most known methods are Si ion implantation [13, 14] and electron beam evaporation followed by subsequent high-temperature annealing as well as laser ablation [15]. learn more For these systems, the successful Si-nc formation was already demonstrated. However, in spite of the relative simplicity of magnetron sputtering technique and its wide application for the fabrication of Si-rich SiO2 materials [5, 8], only few groups applied this method for deposition of Si-rich alumina [16]. The present paper reports the fabrication of Si-rich Al2O3 films with different Si content by magnetron co-sputtering and the effect of post-deposition processing on the structural

and luminescent properties of these materials. Methods The Si-rich Al2O3 films were deposited by radio frequency (RF) magnetron co-sputtering of two separate 2-in. targets (pure Si and Al2O3) on a long quartz substrate at room temperature. The use of long substrate allowed the variation Selleck FRAX597 of the composition along film length in a single deposition run. The length and the Tyrosine-protein kinase BLK width of deposited film were 140 and 4 mm, respectively. The distance between the targets and the substrate was fixed at 64 mm. The background vacuum in the chamber was about 1 × 10−5 Pa prior to the

deposition with the pure argon plasma. The RF power applied on Si and Al2O3 targets were 40 and 80 W, respectively. Apart from Si-rich Al2O3 films, pure Si and pure Al2O3 were deposited at the same conditions from one target only. The deposition time was 250 min for each deposition run. The as-deposited original films were cut then to smaller (1 cm in length) segments (called hereafter as samples) to simplify the investigation of their properties. To study the chemical composition of the films, their refractive index and thickness, the spectroscopic ellipsometry measurement was performed by means of a Jobin-Yvon ellipsometer (UVISEL, HORIBA Ltd., Kyoto, Japan), where the incident light was scanned in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 eV under an incident angle of 66.3°. The fitting of the experimental data was performed using DeltaPsi2 software (HORIBA Ltd., Kyoto, Japan) [17] and allowed to get information about variation of refractive index and thickness along the film length. Additionally, the film thickness was controlled by means of a Dektak 3030 Profilometer (Veeco, Plainview, NY, USA).