Broadband transparent optical phase change materials for high-performance nonvolatile photonics
Name
s41467-019-12196-4.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.4 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
15d91867bac306f08ce1a3a1c54ef82a
Author(s)
Zhang, Yifei
Chou, Jeffrey B.
Li, Junying
Li, Huashan
Du, Qingyang
Yadav, Anupama
Zhou, Si
Shalaginov, Mikhail
Fang, Zhuoran
Zhong, Huikai
Date Issued
September 2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Zhang, Yifei et al. "Broadband transparent optical phase change materials for high-performance nonvolatile photonics." Nature Communications 10, 1 (September 2019) 4279 © 2019, The Author(s).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Materials Systems Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microsystems Technology Laboratories
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Lincoln Laboratory
MIT Materials Research Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-019-12196-4
