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Electrical tuning of phase-change antennas and metasurfaces

Nature Nanotechnology volume 16, pages 667–672 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The success of semiconductor electronics is built on the creation of compact, low-power switching elements that offer routing, logic and memory functions. The availability of nanoscale optical switches could have a similarly transformative impact on the development of dynamic and programmable metasurfaces, optical neural networks and quantum information processing. Phase-change materials are uniquely suited to enable their creation as they offer high-speed electrical switching between amorphous and crystalline states with notably different optical properties. Their high refractive index has already been harnessed to fashion them into compact optical antennas. Here, we take the next important step, by showing electrically-switchable phase-change antennas and metasurfaces that offer strong, reversible, non-volatile, multi-phase switching and spectral tuning of light scattering in the visible and near-infrared spectral ranges. Their successful implementation relies on a careful joint thermal and optical optimization of the antenna elements that comprise a silver strip that simultaneously serves as a plasmonic resonator and a miniature heating stage. Our metasurface affords electrical modulation of the reflectance by more than fourfold at 755 nm.

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Fig. 1: Operation and optical response of an electrically tunable phase-change antenna.
Fig. 2: Electrothermal switching of optical antennas.
Fig. 3: In situ optical measurement of an antenna.
Fig. 4: An electrically tunable phase-change metasurface.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. We would also like to acknowledge funding from AFOSR MURI grant (FA9550-17-1-0002). Part of this work was performed at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities (SNSF), supported by the National Science Foundation under award ECCS-1542152. U.C. was supported in part by Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen (FWO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Yifei Wang, Patrick Landreman, David Schoen, Ann Marshall, Umberto Celano & Mark L. Brongersma

  2. Exponent Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA

    David Schoen

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kye Okabe & H.-S. Philip Wong

  4. IMEC, Leuven, Belgium

    Umberto Celano

  5. Faculty of Science and Technology and MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Umberto Celano

  6. Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Suwon, South Korea

    Junghyun Park

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  1. Yifei Wang
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Contributions

Y.W., P.L., J.P and M.L.B. conceived the ideas for this research project. Y.W. fabricated the devices, performed optical simulations and implemented optical microscopy measurements. D.S. and A.M. prepared the sample and carried out TEM measurements. Y.W. conducted thermal simulations and electrical measurements with the help of K.O. and H.-S.P.W. Conductive atomic force microscopy measurements were performed by Y.W. and U.C. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark L. Brongersma.

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Competing interests

Y.W., M.L.B. and J.P. are inventors on the US patent provisional application (63/064,687) held and submitted by Samsung Electronics that covers the use of electrically tunable phase-change antennas in metasurfaces for dynamic wavefront control.

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Peer review information Nature Nanotechnology thanks Alex Krasnok, Ho Wai Howard Lee and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Notes 1–6 and Figs. 1–14.

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Wang, Y., Landreman, P., Schoen, D. et al. Electrical tuning of phase-change antennas and metasurfaces. Nat. Nanotechnol. 16, 667–672 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-00882-8

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