Active Optical Metasurfaces Based on Defect-Engineered Phase-Transition Materials

Citation:

Jura Rensberg, Shuyan Zhang, You Zhou, Alexander S. McLeod, Christian Schwarz, Michael Goldflam, Mengkun Liu, Jochen Kerbusch, Ronny Nawrodt, Shriram Ramanathan, D. N. Basov, Federico Capasso, Carsten Ronning, and Mikhail A. Kats. 2016. “Active Optical Metasurfaces Based on Defect-Engineered Phase-Transition Materials.” NANO LETTERS, 16, 2, Pp. 1050-1055.
2016_rensberg_et_al.pdf2.09 MB

Abstract:

Active, widely tunable optical materials have enabled rapid advances in photonics and optoelectronics, especially in the emerging field of meta-devices. Here, we demonstrate that spatially selective defect engineering on the nanometer scale can transform phase transition materials into optical metasurfaces. Using ion irradiation through nanometer-scale masks, we selectively defect-engineered the insulator-metal transition of vanadium dioxide, a prototypical correlated phase-transition material whose optical properties change dramatically depending on its state. Using this robust technique, we demonstrated several optical metasurfaces, including tunable absorbers with artificially induced phase coexistence and tunable polarizers based on thermally triggered dichroism. Spatially selective nanoscale defect engineering represents a new paradigm for active photonic structures and devices.
Last updated on 05/27/2020