Stability Improved Stretchable Metallic Gratings With Tunable Grating Period in Submicron Scale

We demonstrate a stretchable metallic gratings by fabricating an ordered buckling surface structure on an elastomeric substrate. Through oxygen plasma treatment of a prestretched elastomeric membrane, polymer gratings as templates are formed spontaneously after releasing the strain. The template gratings with different initial periods at submicron scale have been achieved simply by controlling the duration of the oxygen plasma treatment. Tunable surface plasmon-polariton (SPP) resonance can be excited in wavelength scale by depositing a thin metallic film on the template gratings. The stability of the metallic gratings´ morphology has been improved by taking a template-restretching step before the metallic film deposition to weaken the Poisson effect. A tunable region of 90 nm for the SPP resonance has been achieved by stretching the metallic gratings up to 27.1% strain.