Titanium nitride as a plasmonic material for visible wavelengths

Abstract: The search for alternative plasmonic materials with improved optical properties over the traditional materials like silver and gold could ultimately lead to the long-awaited, real-life applications of plasmonic devices and metamaterials. In this work, we show that titanium nitride could perform as an alternative plasmonic material in the visible wavelength range. We evaluate the performances of various plasmonic and metamaterial structures with titanium nitride as a plasmonic component and show that transformation-optics devices and an important class of metamaterials with hyperbolic dispersion based on TiN could significantly outperform similar devices based on conventional metals in the visible wavelengths range.