Chiral Phase Change Nanomaterials
Abstract
Chiral nanostructures offer the ability to respond to the vector nature of a light beam at the nanoscale. While naturally chiral materials offer a path towards scalability, engineered structures offer a path to wavelength tunability through geometric manipulation. Neither approach, however, allows for temporal control of chirality. Therefore, in the best of all worlds, it is crucial to realize chiral materials that possess the quality of scalability, tailored wavelength response, and dynamic control at high speeds. Here, a new class of intrinsically chiral phase change nanomaterials (PCNMs) is proposed and explored, based on a scalable bottom-up fabrication technique with a high degree of control in three dimensions. Angular resolved Mueller Matrix and spectroscopic ellipsometry are performed to characterize the optical birefringence and dichroism, and a numerical model is provided to explain the origin of optical activity. This work achieves the critical goal of demonstrating high-speed dynamic switching of chirality over 50,000 cycles via the underlying PCNM.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.09940,
title = {Chiral Phase Change Nanomaterials},
author = {Joshua A. Burrow and Md Shah Alam and Evan M. Smith and Riad Yahiaoui and Ryan Laing and Piyush J. Shah and Thomas A. Searles and Shivashankar Vangala and Joshua R. Hendrickson and Andrew Sarangan and Imad Agha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09940},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
21 pages, 10 page supplement, 16 figures