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Register a new userNon-volatile reconfigurable integrated photonics enabled by broadband low-loss phase change material
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Phase change materials (PCMs) have long been used as a storage medium in rewritable compact disk and later in random access memory. In recent years, the integration of PCMs with nanophotonic structures has introduced a new paradigm for non-volatile reconfigurable optics. However, the high loss of the archetypal PCM Ge2Sb2Te5 in both visible and telecommunication wavelengths has fundamentally limited its applications. Sb2S3 has recently emerged as a wide-bandgap PCM with transparency windows ranging from 610nm to near-IR. In this paper, the strong optical phase modulation and low optical loss of Sb2S3 are experimentally demonstrated for the first time in integrated photonic platforms at both 750nm and 1550nm. As opposed to silicon, the thermo-optic coefficient of Sb2S3 is shown to be negative, making the Sb2S3-Si hybrid platform less sensitive to thermal fluctuation. Finally, a Sb2S3 integrated non-volatile microring switch is demonstrated which can be tuned electrically between a high and low transmission state with a contrast over 30dB. Our work experimentally verified the prominent phase modification and low loss of Sb2S3 in wavelength ranges relevant for both solid-state quantum emitter and telecommunication, enabling potential applications such as optical field programmable gate array, post-fabrication trimming, and large-scale integrated quantum photonic network.
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An optical equivalent of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is of great interest to large-scale photonic integrated circuits. Previous programmable photonic devices relying on the weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic effect usually suffer from a large footprint and high energy consumption. Phase change materials (PCMs) offer a promising solution due to the large non-volatile change in the refractive index upon phase transition. However, the large optical loss in PCMs poses a serious problem. Here, by exploiting an asymmetric directional coupler design, we demonstrate PCM-clad silicon photonic 1 times 2 and 2 times 2 switches with a low insertion loss of ~1 dB and a compact coupling length of ~30 {mu}m while maintaining a small crosstalk less than ~10 dB over a bandwidth of 30 nm. The reported optical switches will function as the building blocks of the meshes in the optical FPGAs for applications such as optical interconnects, neuromorphic computing, quantum computing, and microwave photonics.
Light strongly interacts with structures that are of a similar scale to its wavelength; typically nanoscale features for light in the visible spectrum. However, the optical response of these nanostructures is usually fixed during the fabrication. Phase change materials offer a way to tune the properties of these structures in nanoseconds. Until now, phase change active photonics use materials that strongly absorb visible light, which limits their application in the visible spectrum. In contrast, Stibnite (Sb2S3) is an under-explored phase change material with a band gap that can be tuned in the visible spectrum from 2.0 to 1.7 eV. We deliberately couple this tuneable band gap to an optical resonator such that it responds dramatically in the visible spectrum to Sb2S3 reversible structural phase transitions. We show that this optical response can be triggered both optically and electrically. High speed reprogrammable Sb2S3 based photonic devices, such as those reported here, are likely to have wide applications in future intelligent photonic systems, holographic displays, and micro-spectrometers.
Active metasurfaces promise reconfigurable optics with drastically improved compactness, ruggedness, manufacturability, and functionality compared to their traditional bulk counterparts. Optical phase change materials (O-PCMs) offer an appealing material solution for active metasurface devices with their large index contrast and nonvolatile switching characteristics. Here we report what we believe to be the first electrically reconfigurable nonvolatile metasurfaces based on O-PCMs. The O-PCM alloy used in the devices, Ge2Sb2Se4Te1 (GSST), uniquely combines giant non-volatile index modulation capability, broadband low optical loss, and a large reversible switching volume, enabling significantly enhanced light-matter interactions within the active O-PCM medium. Capitalizing on these favorable attributes, we demonstrated continuously tunable active metasurfaces with record half-octave spectral tuning range and large optical contrast of over 400%. We further prototyped a polarization-insensitive phase-gradient metasurface to realize dynamic optical beam steering.
Motivated by the recent growing demand in dynamically-controlled flat optics, we take advantage of a hybrid phase-change plasmonic metasurface (MS) to effectively tailor the amplitude, phase, and polarization responses of the incident beam within a unique structure. Such a periodic architecture exhibits two fundamental modes; pronounced counter-propagating short-range surface plasmon polariton (SR-SPP) coupled to the Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) alloy as the feed gap, and the propagative surface plasmon polariton (PR-SPP) resonant modes tunneling to the GST nanostripes. By leveraging the multistate phase transition of alloy from amorphous to the crystalline, which induces significant complex permittivity change, the interplay between such enhanced modes can be drastically modified. Accordingly, in the intermediate phases, the proposed system experiences a coupled condition of operational over-coupling and under-coupling regimes leading to an inherently broadband response. We wisely addressing each gate-tunable meta-atom to achieve robust control over the reflection characteristics, wide phase agility up to 315? or considerable reflectance modulation up to 60%, which facilitate a myriad of on-demand optical functionalities in the telecommunication band. Based on the revealed underlying physics and electro-thermal effects in the GST alloy, a simple systematic approach for realization of an electro-optically tunable multifunctional metadevice governing anomalous reflection angle control (e.g., phased array antenna), near-perfect absorption (e.g., modulator), and polarization conversion (e.g., wave plate) is presented. As a promising alternative to their passive counterparts, such high-speed, non-volatile MSs offer an smart paradigm for reversible, energy-efficient, and programmable optoelectronic devices such as holograms, switches, and polarimeters.
Gallium nitride (GaN) as a wide-band gap material has been widely used in solid-state lighting. Thanks to its high nonlinearity and high refractive index contrast, GaN-on-insulator (GaNOI) is also a promising platform for nonlinear optical applications. Despite its intriguing optical proprieties, nonlinear applications of GaN have rarely been studied due to the relatively high optical loss of GaN waveguides (2 dB/cm). In this letter, we report GaNOI microresonator with intrinsic quality factor over 2 million, corresponding to an optical loss of 0.26 dB/cm. Parametric oscillation threshold power as low as 8.8 mW is demonstrated, and the experimentally extracted nonlinear index of GaN at telecom wavelengths is estimated to be n2 = 1.2*10 -18 m2W-1, which is comparable with silicon. Single soliton generation in GaN is implemented by an auxiliary laser pumping scheme, so as to mitigate the high thermorefractive effect in GaN. The large intrinsic nonlinear refractive index, together with its broadband transparency window and high refractive index contrast, make GaNOI a most balanced platform for chip-scale nonlinear applications.
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