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.
Highlights
T unable optical metamaterials and metasurfaces are an emerging frontier with promising applications including optical modulation, routing, dynamic beam shaping, and adaptive optics.[1−5] Dynamic control in meta-devices can be achieved by careful integration of existing designs with active media, for example, liquid crystals,[6,7] graphene,[8] or strongly electron-correlated[9−11] and chalcogenide[12] phase-transition materials
Unlike existing means to modify the insulator-metal transition (IMT) via doping during growth,[23] ion beam irradiation can be combined with lithographic patterning to create complex optical meta-devices with designer phase transitions (Figure 1)
The IMT is very sensitive to the stability of the electron hybridization and to electronic doping,[23] structural defects,[25,26] and lattice strain,[27−29] all of which can be introduced via ion beam irradiation
Summary
Jura, Shuyan Zhang, You Zhou, Alexander S. McLeod, Christian Schwarz, Michael Goldflam, Mengkun Liu, et al 2016. “Active Optical Metasurfaces Based on Defect-Engineered PhaseTransition Materials.”. This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, WARNING: This file should NOT have been available for downloading from Harvard University’s DASH repository. 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.
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