Nonvolatile plasmonics based on optically reprogrammable phase change materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel nonvolatile optical switching platform combining plasmonics and phase change materials, achieving low energy consumption, fast switching, and high sensitivity for advanced photonic devices.

Contribution

It presents a new plasmonic waveguide design utilizing optically reprogrammable phase change materials for efficient, low-power, and highly sensitive optical switches with improved performance.

Findings

Significant reduction in switching energy due to plasmonic field enhancement.

Ability to operate with zero static power consumption.

High sensitivity of the device to phase change material property variations.

Abstract

We propose here a new platform for a realization of novel nonvolatile optical switching devices that takes an advantage of high field confinement provided by plasmonics and multi-state programming capabilities of chalcogenide phase change materials. A high reduction in the overall energy consumption consists of a high field enhancement provided by plasmonic that allow to lower the switching energies and implementation of phase change materials that allow to operate under a zero-static power consumption. A combination of plasmonics and phase change materials provide additionally an essential improvement in terms of a switching time, attenuation contrast and possibility to perform a phase shift with the wide bandgap phase change materials. In most of the all-optical switching photonic devices, a switching mechanism is realized optically through heating of phase change materials. Here, two stage heating process is proposed that is based on the absorption of light by phase change materials itself, and a heat transfer from the metal stripe under an absorption of light by a metal. Thus, compared to any other previously presented optical switches, even a wide bandgap phase change materials that show zero absorption of light can be implemented in the proposed structure. The proposed plasmonic waveguide arrangement is extremely sensitive to any changes of the phase change material properties, thus, even a minor change of temperature provides an essential change in the transmitted light.