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Register a new userVO2 Nanocrystals for Designer Phase-Change Metamaterials
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Subwavelength nanoparticles can support electromagnetic resonances with distinct features depending on their size, shape and nature. For example, electric and magnetic Mie resonances occur in dielectric particles, while plasmonic resonances appear in metals. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that the multipolar resonances hosted by VO2 nanocrystals can be dynamically tuned and switched thanks to the insulator-to-metal transition of VO2. Using both Mie theory and Maxwell Garnett effective medium theory, we retrieve the complex refractive index of the effective medium composed of a slab of VO2 nanospheres embedded in SiO2 and show that such a resulting metamaterial presents distinct optical tunability compared to unpatterned VO2. We further show that this provides a new degree of freedom to design low-loss phase-change metamaterials with designer optical tunability and actively controlled light scattering.
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Structural colors generated due to light scattering from static all-dielectric metasurfaces have successfully enabled high-resolution, high-saturation and wide-gamut color printing applications. Despite recent advances, most demonstrations of these structure-dependent colors lack post-fabrication tunability that hinders their applicability for front-end dynamic display technologies. Phase-change materials (PCMs), with significant contrast of their optical properties between their amorphous and crystalline states, have demonstrated promising potentials in reconfigurable nanophotonics. Herein, we leverage a tunable all-dielectric reflective metasurface made of a newly emerged class of low-loss optical PCMs with superb characteristics, i.e., antimony trisulphide (Sb$_2$S$_3$), antimony triselenide (Sb$_2$Se$_3$), and binary germanium-doped selenide (GeSe$_3$), to realize switchable, high-saturation, high-efficiency and high-resolution structural colors. Having polarization sensitive building blocks, the presented metasurface can generate two different colors when illuminated by two orthogonally polarized incident beams. Such degrees of freedom (i.e., structural state and polarization) enable a single reconfigurable metasurface with fixed geometrical parameters to generate four distinct wide-gamut colors suitable for a wide range of applications, including tunable full-color printing and displays, information encryption, and anti-counterfeiting.
Since the invention of the laser, adoption of new gain media and device architectures has provided solutions to a variety of applications requiring specific power, size, spectral, spatial, and temporal tunability. Here we introduce a fundamentally new type of tunable semiconductor laser based on a phase-change perovskite metasurface that acts simultaneously as gain medium and optical cavity. As a proof of principle demonstration, we fabricate a subwavelength-thin perovskite metasurface supporting bound states in the continuum (BICs). Upon the perovskite structural phase transitions, both its refractive index and gain vary substantially, inducing fast (1.35 nm/K rate) and broad spectral tunability (>15 nm in the near-infrared), deterministic spatial mode hopping between polarization vortexes, and hysteretic optical bistability of the microlaser. These features highlight the uniqueness of phase-change perovskite tunable lasers, which may find wide applications in compact and low-cost optical multiplexers, sensors, memories, and LIDARs.
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.
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.
Despite recent advances in active metaoptics, wide dynamic range combined with high-speed reconfigurable solutions is still elusive. Phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a compelling platform for metasurface optical elements, owing to the large index contrast and fast yet stable phase transition properties. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an in situ electrically-driven reprogrammable metasurface by harnessing the unique properties of a phase-change chalcogenide alloy, Ge$_{2}$Sb$_{2}$Te$_{5}$ (GST), in order to realize fast, non-volatile, reversible, multilevel, and pronounced optical modulation in the near-infrared spectral range. Co-optimized through a multiphysics analysis, we integrate an efficient heterostructure resistive microheater that indirectly heats and transforms the embedded GST film without compromising the optical performance of the metasurface even after several reversible phase transitions. A hybrid plasmonic-PCM meta-switch with a record electrical modulation of the reflectance over eleven-fold (an absolute reflectance contrast reaching 80%), unprecedented quasi-continuous spectral tuning over 250 nm, and switching speed that can potentially reach a few kHz is presented. Our work represents a significant step towards the development of fully integrable dynamic metasurfaces and their potential for beamforming applications.
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