Purdue University researchers found that by tailoring the film thickness of conducting nitrides and oxides, specifically plasmonic titanium nitride (TiN) and aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO), they can control the materials' optical properties, most notably their epsilon near zero (ENZ) behaviors. The TiN and AZO materials developed at Purdue also feature the lowest reported optical losses. This provides novel applications for the telecommunications field and furthers the study of many optical nonlinearities.