Broadband transparent optical phase change materials for high-performance nonvolatile photonics
By Yifei Zhang, J. Chou, Junying Li, Huashan Li, Qingyang Du, A. Yadav, Si Zhou, M. Shalaginov, Zhuoran Fang, Huikai Zhong and 11 more. Nature Communications, 2018
630 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Optical phase change materials (O-PCMs), a unique group of materials featuring exceptional optical property contrast upon a solid-state phase transition, have found widespread adoption in photonic applications such as switches, routers and reconfigurable meta-optics. Current O-PCMs, such as Ge–Sb–Te (GST), exhibit large contrast of both refractive index (Δn) and optical loss (Δk), simultaneously. The coupling of both optical properties fundamentally limits the performance of many applications. Here we introduce a new class of O-PCMs based on Ge–Sb–Se–Te (GSST) which breaks this traditional coupling. The optimized alloy, Ge2Sb2Se4Te1, combines broadband transparency (1–18.5 μm), large optical contrast (Δn = 2.0), and significantly improved glass forming ability, enabling an entirely new range of infrared and thermal photonic devices. We further demonstrate nonvolatile integrated optical switches with record low loss and large contrast ratio and an electrically-addressed spatial light modulator pixel, thereby validating its promise as a material for scalable nonvolatile photonics. Here, the authors introduce optical phase change materials based on Ge-Sb-Se-Te which breaks the coupling between refractive index and optical loss allowing low-loss performance benefits. They demonstrate low losses in nonvolatile photonic circuits and electrical pixelated switching have been demonstrated.
Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/222f61da0136548223d05cac250d71add890df84
How researchers see this paper
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- Carlos R'ios
- S. An
- T. Gu
- Clayton Fowler
- Qingyang Du
- M. Shalaginov
- B. Zheng
- Juejun Hu
Citations in the corpus
- Photonics for artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing (2020, neutral): “the “lowloss” material GeSbSeTe [115]).”
- Ultra-compact nonvolatile phase shifter based on electrically reprogrammable transparent phase change materials (2021, methodology): “The film deposition was performed using thermal evaporation from Sb2Se3 bulk materials following previously established protocols [56, 57].”
- A Deep Learning Approach for Objective-Driven All-Dielectric Metasurface Design (2019, positive): “Even refractive index can become a design variable for meta-atoms based on phase-change materials (31-34).”