Electrically Reconfigurable Nonvolatile Metasurface Using Low-Loss Optical Phase Change Material
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2008.06659,
title = {Electrically Reconfigurable Nonvolatile Metasurface Using Low-Loss Optical Phase Change Material},
author = {Yifei Zhang and Clayton Fowler and Junhao Liang and Bilal Azhar and Mikhail Y. Shalaginov and Skylar Deckoff-Jones and Sensong An and Jeffrey B. Chou and Christopher M. Roberts and Vladimir Liberman and Myungkoo Kang and Carlos Ríos and Kathleen A. Richardson and Clara Rivero-Baleine and Tian Gu and Hualiang Zhang and Juejun Hu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.06659},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
12 pages, 5 figures