Wafer-Scale Epitaxy of Flexible Nitride Films with Superior Plasmonic and Superconducting Performance

Abstract

Transition-metal nitrides (e.g., TiN, ZrN, TaN) are incredible materials with excellent complementary metal-oxide semiconductor compatibility and remarkable performance in refractory plasmonics and superconducting quantum electronics. Epitaxial growth of flexible transition-metal nitride films, especially at the wafer scale, is fundamentally important for developing high-performance flexible photonics and superconducting electronics, but the study is rare thus far. This work reports the high-quality epitaxy of 2-in. titanium nitride (TiN) films on flexible fluorophlogopite-mica (F-mica) substrates via reactive magnetron sputtering. Combined measurements of spectroscopic ellipsometry and electrical transport reveal the superior plasmonic and superconducting performance of TiN/F-mica films owing to the high single crystallinity. More interestingly, the superconductivity of these flexible TiN films can be manipulated by the bending states, and enhanced superconducting critical temperature TC is observed in convex TiN films with in-plane tensile strain. Density functional theory calculations reveal that the strain can tune the electron–phonon interaction strength and the resultant superconductivity of TiN films. This study provides a promising route toward integrating scalable single-crystalline transition-metal nitride films with flexible electronics for high-performance plasmonics and superconducting electronics.