Palladium on plastic substrates for plasmonic devices.

Innovative chips based on palladium thin films deposited on plastic substrates have been tested in the Kretschmann surface plasmon resonance (SPR) configuration. The new chips combine the advantages of a plastic support that is interesting and commercially appealing and the physical properties of palladium, showing inverted surface plasmon resonance (ISPR). The detection of DNA chains has been selected as the target of the experiment, since it can be applied to several medical early diagnostic tools, such as different biomarkers of cancers or cystic fibrosis.

Stability of EUV multilayer coatings to low energy alpha particles bombardment.

Future solar missions will investigate the Sun from very close distances and optical components are constantly exposed to low energy ions irradiation. In this work we present the results of a new experiment related to low energy alpha particles bombardments on Mo/Si multilayer optical coatings. Different multilayer samples, with and without a protecting capping layer, have been exposed to low energy alpha particles (4keV), fixing the ions fluency and varying the time of exposure in order to change the total dose accumulated.