Optical phase-change materials are highly promising for emerging applications such as tunable metasurfaces, reconfigurable photonic circuits, and non-von Neumann computing. However, these materials typically require both high melting temperatures and fast quenching rates to reversibly switch between their crystalline and amorphous phases, a significant challenge for large-scale integration. Here, we present an experimental technique which leverages the thermo-optic effect in GST to enable both spatial and temporal thermal measurements of two common electro-thermal microheater designs currently used by the phase-change community. Our approach shows excellent agreement between experimental results and numerical simulations and provides a non-invasive method for rapid characterization of electrically programmable phase-change devices.
@article{arxiv.2210.08142,
title = {Time-resolved temperature mapping leveraging the strong thermo-optic effect in phase-change devices},
author = {Nicholas A. Nobile and John R. Erickson and Carlos Ríos and Yifei Zhang and Juejun Hu and Steven A. Vitale and Feng Xiong and Nathan Youngblood},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.08142},
year = {2022}
}