Ag-doped SiO2/TiO2 hybrid optical sensitive thin films with visible absorption enhancement for diffractive optical element application

This paper reports the synthesis of Ag-doped SiO₂/TiO₂ hybrid optical sensitive thin films deposited by sol-gel spin coating technique. The structural properties of thin films were characterized by XRD, TEM and EDX. The optical absorption of the films in visible region measured by UV-VIS can be enhanced by Ag nanoparticles due to surface plasmon resonance effect. Photosensitive film can be utilized as effective photosensitive material for diffractive optical element with controllable period by interference angle using interference lithography technique. AFM was employed to investigate the fabricated patterns. The diffraction pattern highly correlated to the performance of diffractive optical element is scrutinized.