Capacitance study of a polystyrene nanoparticles capacitor using impedance spectroscopy

In this study, a metal-insulator-metal capacitor structure is fabricated using polystyrene-nanoparticles. Impedance spectrocopy is used to evaluate the performance of this capacitor in which we found out a significant magnitude increment in capacitance and loss tangent compared with an equivalent ideal capacitor with continuous polystyrene layer and same geometry. Capacitance values up to 11.7 and loss tangent values up to 387 (at 0.1Hz) larger than the expected for a continuous polystyrene MIM capacitor are achieved. The capacitor shows a good stable capacitive behavior in the frequency range from 0.1Hz to 100kHz at room temperature, 30°C, 40°C and 50°C without an effective relaxation process. Nyquist, capacitance, loss tangent and normalized powers curves are analysed by modified randles model. Also, it is observed a slight decrease in the capacitance value at 50°C that may be attributed to space charge localized at the nanoparticles interface and that are affected by the temperature changes.