Laser direct patterning induced the tunable optical properties of indium tin oxide micro-hole films

Here we introduce a facile method to fabricate patterned indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films via selective laser ablation at ambient conditions. By scanning the ITO thin films with focused Nd: YAG pulsed laser, the ITO thin films were selective ablated and patterned without using any conventional chemical etching or photolithography steps. Then we investigated the effects of scanning rate for the structure, morphology and optical properties of patterned ITO thin film. These results indicate that the epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) wavelength of ITO thin films can be tuned from 1100 nm to 1340 nm by adjusting the period of the micro-hole array in microstructure. The nonlinear absorption response of patterned ITO films was about 2.85 time than of the as-deposited ITO thin film. Additionally, the results of the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulation are in good agreement with those of the experiments.