Light emission from self-assembled and laser-crystallized chalcogenide metasurface

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel self-assembled chalcogenide metasurface using solution processing and silicon templates, demonstrating enhanced light emission, Raman, and photoluminescence due to resonant nanostructures and thermal effects.

Contribution

It introduces a self-assembled, solution-processed arsenic sulfide metasurface with resonance-enhanced light emission, overcoming fabrication inhomogeneities and enabling tunable optical properties.

Findings

Enhanced local light-matter interaction observed

Wavelength selective anisotropic photoluminescence demonstrated

Modified thermal distribution influences crystallization process

Abstract

Subwavelength periodic confinement can collectively and selectively enhance local light intensity and enable control over the photo-induced phase transformations at the nanometer scale. Standard nanofabrication process can result in geometrical and compositional inhomogeneities in optical phase change materials, especially chalcogenides, as those materials exhibit poor chemical and thermal stability. Here we demonstrate the self-assembled planar chalcogenide nanostructured array with resonance enhanced light emission to create an all-dielectric optical metasurface, by taking advantage of the fluid properties associated with solution processed films. A patterned silicon membrane serves as a template for shaping the chalcogenide metasurface structure. Solution-processed arsenic sulfide metasurface structures are self-assembled in the suspended 250 nm silicon membrane templates. The periodic nanostructure dramatically manifests the local light-matter interaction such as absorption of incident photons, Raman emission, and photoluminescence. Also, the thermal distribution is modified by the boundaries and thus the photo-thermal crystallization process, leading to the formation of anisotropic nano-emitters within the field enhancement area. This hybrid structure shows wavelength selective anisotropic photoluminescence, which is a characteristic behavior of the collective response of the resonant guided modes in a periodic nanostructure. The resonance enhanced Purcell effect could manifest the quantum efficiency of localized light emission.