Permittivity of Ge, Te and Se thin films in the 200-1500 nm spectral range. Predicting the segregation effects in silver

Optical properties of well-known bulk materials can be significantly modified by decreasing dimensions to nm-size. Using Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and e-beam Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD) we have fabricated 20-30 nm-thick amorphous Ge, Te and Se films. The permittivities of investigated layers have been extracted from measurements of the Psi and Delta ellipsometric azimuths. We found that for all of the investigated films, the intensity of all bands in the permittivity spectrum is smaller than for bulk materials or thick (> 100 nm) films. Using the acquired optical constants along with the permittivity of a 20 nm-thick silver film, we have applied the Maxwell-Garnett equation to predict the permittivities of a silver film with Ge, Se or Te segregated in its structure. Implementing the parameters of 20 nm-thick Ge results in an 81 nm redshift of the segregation-induced band with respect to the experimental value, while implementing the parameters of 2 nm-thick Ge film results in a 95 nm blueshift of this band.