Ultrafast structural color change in indium tin oxide/titanium dioxide 1D photonic crystal

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates ultrafast optical modulation of a 1D photonic crystal incorporating ITO, enabling rapid tuning of its photonic bandgap through photoinduced refractive index changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ultrafast all-optical tuning method for photonic crystals using ITO's plasmonic properties and fabricates a multilayer structure with demonstrated visible region modulation.

Findings

Ultrafast change in ITO's refractive index upon photoexcitation.

Tunable photonic bandgap in the visible spectrum.

Successful fabrication of multilayer photonic crystal with dynamic optical response.

Abstract

Photonic crystals can integrate plasmonic materials such as indium tin oxide (ITO) in their structure. Exploiting ITO plasmonic properties it is possible to tune the photonic band gap of the photonic crystal upon the application of an external stimuli. In this work, we have fabricated a one-dimensional multilayer photonic crystal via radiofrequency sputtering and we have triggered its optical response with ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy. Upon photoexcitation we observe a change in the refractive index of indium tin oxide. Such effect has been used to create a photonic crystal that change its photonic bandgap in an ultrafast time scale. All optical modulation in the visible region, that can be tuned by designing the photonic crystal, has been demonstrated.