Unravelling and circumventing failure mechanisms in chalcogenide optical phase change materials
Abstract
Chalcogenide optical phase change materials (PCMs) have garnered significant interest for their growing applications in programmable photonics, optical analog computing, active metasurfaces, and beyond. Limited endurance or cycling lifetime is however increasingly becoming a bottleneck toward their practical deployment for these applications. To address this issue, we performed a systematic study elucidating the cycling failure mechanisms of GeSbSeTe (GSST), a common optical PCM tailored for infrared photonic applications, in an electrothermal switching configuration commensurate with their applications in on-chip photonic devices. We further propose a set of design rules building on insights into the failure mechanisms, and successfully implemented them to boost the endurance of the GSST device to over 67,000 cycles.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.12313,
title = {Unravelling and circumventing failure mechanisms in chalcogenide optical phase change materials},
author = {Cosmin Constantin Popescu and Kiumars Aryana and Brian Mills and Tae Woo Lee and Louis Martin-Monier and Luigi Ranno and Jia Xu Brian Sia and Khoi Phuong Dao and Hyung-Bin Bae and Vladimir Liberman and Steven Vitale and Myungkoo Kang and Kathleen A. Richardson and Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo and Dennis Calahan and Yifei Zhang and William M. Humphreys and Hyun Jung Kim and Tian Gu and Juejun Hu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.12313},
year = {2024}
}