We experimentally demonstrate a very large dynamic optical reflection modulation from a simple unpatterned layered stack of phase-change materials ultrathin films. Specifically, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that properly designed deeply subwavelength GeSbTe (GST) films on a metallic mirror produce a dynamic modulation of light in the near-infrared from very strong reflection (R>80%) to perfect absorption (A > 99,97%) by simply switching the crystalline state of the phase-change material. While the amplitude of modulation can lead to an optical contrast up to 10^6, we can also actively "write" intermediate levels of reflection in between extreme values, corresponding to partial crystallization of the GST layer. We further explore several layered system designs and provide guidelines to tailor the wavelength efficiency range, the angle of operation and the degree of crystallization leading to perfect absorption.
Scalable Fabrication of Thermally Reconfigurable Ge Metasurfaces Using Stencil Lithography for Mid-Infrared Molecular Sensing
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校生物医学工程系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Istanbul University（伊斯坦布尔大学理学院物理系）
We designed and demonstrated a multi-spectral programmable perfect absorber that exploits two different phase-change materials. This programmability is possible by resonantly coupling two phase change materials, a Ge2Sb2Te5 layer to vanadium dioxide nanoparticles (VO2 NPs). The perfect absorption is attributed to the coalescence of gap plasmon modes excited between the NPs and waveguide cavity-like modes excited between the film and the NPs. The absorptance peak (>90%) can be tuned to four different infrared (IR) wavelengths from 1906 to 2960 nm by heating the structure to different temperatur…
Molding the flow of light at the nanoscale has been a grand challenge of nanophotonics for decades. It is now widely recognized that metasurfaces represent a chip-scale nanophotonics array technology capable of comprehensively controlling the wavefront of light via appropriately configuring subwavelength antenna elements. Here, we demonstrate a reconfigurable metasurface that is universal, i.e., notionally capable of providing diverse optical functions in the telecommunication wavelength regime, using a compact, lightweight, electronically-controlled array with no moving parts. By electro-opti…
Optical chirality is central to many industrial photonic technologies including enantiomer identification, ellipsometry-based tomography and spin multiplexing in optical communication. However, a substantial chiral response requires a typical three-dimensional (3D) constituent, thereby making the paradigm highly complex. Photonic devices integrated with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have shown potential for chiral light control by external stimuli, but the stimuli usually demand a destructive dosage. Here, we report a simple synthetic chiral paradigm that is electrically programmable w…
All-optical Lithography for Spatiotemporal Patterning of High-Modulation Azopolymer Microreliefs
University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden（德累斯顿莱布尼茨聚合物研究所）；Dresden University of Technology（德累斯顿工业大学）
Optical cavities find diverse uses in lasers, frequency combs, optomechanics, and optical signal processors. Complete reconfigurability of the resonant frequency as well as the loss enables development of generic field programmable cavities for achieving the desired performance in these applications. Conventional reconfigurable cavities are generally limited to specific material platforms or specific optical tuning methods and require sophisticated fabrication. Furthermore, the tuning of the loss is coupled to the resonance-shift in the cavity. We propose and demonstrate a simple and generic i…
Reconfigurable quantum circuits are fundamental building blocks for the implementation of scalable quantum technologies. Their implementation has been pursued in linear optics through the engineering of sophisticated interferometers. While such optical networks have been successful in demonstrating the control of small-scale quantum circuits, scaling up to larger dimensions poses significant challenges. Here, we demonstrate a potentially scalable route towards reconfigurable optical networks based on the use of a multimode fibre and advanced wavefront-shaping techniques. We program networks in…
Programmable Non-Hermitian Synchronization of Light on a Silicon Photonic Processor
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Vaasa（瓦萨大学）；Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
We present a modular design for integrated programmable multimode sources of arbitrary Gaussian states of light. The technique is based on current technologies, in particular recent demonstrations of on-chip photon manipulation and generation of highly squeezed vacuum states in semiconductors. While the design is generic and independent of the choice of integrated platform, we adopt recent experimental results on compound semiconductors as a demonstrative example. Such a device would be valuable as a source for many quantum protocols that range from imaging to communication and information pro…
Reconfigurable metamaterials require constituent nanostructures to demonstrate switching of shapes with external stimuli. For generality, such nanostructures would touch and stick to other surfaces in one of its configurations. Yet, a longstanding challenge is in overcoming this stiction caused by Van der Waals forces, which impedes shape recovery. Here, we introduce a stiff yet self-recovering material system based on acrylic acid, and tested it in high-aspect ratio structures, where recovery is weak. This designer material has a storage modulus of ~5.2 GPa at room temperature and ~90 MPa in …
Achieving an electrically tunable phased array optical antenna surface has been a principal challenge in the field of metasurfaces. In this letter, we demonstrate a device platform for achieving reconfigurable control over the resonant wavelength of a subwavelength optical antenna through free-carrier injection. We engineer and grow, using molecular beam epitaxy, a heterostructure of In1-xAlxAs/InAs/AlyGa1-ySb layers designed to achieve large amplitude and phase modulation of light by maximizing the refractive index change in regions of resonant field enhancement The p-i-n layers are grown on …
Programmable photonic circuits of reconfigurable interferometers can be used to implement arbitrary operations on optical modes, facilitating a flexible platform for accelerating tasks in quantum simulation, signal processing, and artificial intelligence. A major obstacle to scaling up these systems is static fabrication error, where small component errors within each device accrue to produce significant errors within the circuit computation. Mitigating this error usually requires numerical optimization dependent on real-time feedback from the circuit, which can greatly limit the scalability o…
Reconfigurability of integrated photonic chips plays a key role in current experiments in the area of linear-optical quantum computing. We demonstrate a reconfigurable multiport interferometer implemented as a femtosecond laser-written integrated photonic device. The device includes a femtosecond laser-written $4\times 4$ multiport interferometer equipped with 12 thermooptical phase shifters, making it a universal programmable linear-optical circuit. We achieve a record fast switching time for a single nested Mach-Zender interferometer of $\sim10$ ms and quantitatively analyse the reconfigurab…
The development of large-scale optical quantum information processing circuits ground on the stability and reconfigurability enabled by integrated photonics. We demonstrate a reconfigurable 8x8 integrated linear optical network based on silicon nitride waveguides for quantum information processing. Our processor implements a novel optical architecture enabling any arbitrary linear transformation and constitutes the largest programmable circuit reported so far on this platform. We validate a variety of photonic quantum information processing primitives, in the form of Hong-Ou-Mandel interferenc…
We present a hybrid device platform for creating an electrically reconfigurable metasurface formed by the integration of plasmonic nanostructures with phase-change material germanium antimony telluride (GST). By changing the phase of GST from amorphous to crystalline through Joule heating, a large range of responses from the metasurface can be achieved. Furthermore, by using the intermediate phases of GST, the metasurface can interact with the incident light in both over-coupling and under-coupling regimes, leading to an inherently broadband response. Through a detailed investigation of the na…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Korea University（高丽大学）；Seoul National University of Science and Technology（首尔科学技术大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
Reconfigurable linear optical networks are a key component for the development of optical quantum information processing platforms in the NISQ era and beyond. We report the implementation of such a device based on an innovative design that uses the mode mixing of a multimode fiber in combination with the programmable wavefront shaping of a SLM. The capabilities of the platform are explored in the classical regime. For up to 8 inputs and a record number of 38 outputs, we achieve fidelities in excess of 93%, and losses below 6.5dB. The device was built inside a standard server rack to allow for …
Reconfigurability of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has become increasingly important due to the growing demands for electronic-photonic systems on a chip driven by emerging applications, including neuromorphic computing, quantum information, and microwave photonics. Success in these fields usually requires highly scalable photonic switching units as essential building blocks. Current photonic switches, however, mainly rely on materials with weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic modulation effects, resulting in a large footprint and high energy consumption. As a promising alternati…
Adaptable, reconfigurable and programmable are key functionalities for the next generation of silicon-based photonic processors, neural and quantum networks. Phase change technology offers proven non-volatile electronic programmability, however the materials used to date have shown prohibitively high optical losses which are incompatible with integrated photonic platforms. Here, we demonstrate the capability of the previously unexplored material Sb$_2$Se$_3$ for ultralow-loss programmable silicon photonics. The favorable combination of large refractive index contrast and ultralow losses seen i…
Reconfigurable photonic devices capable of routing the flow of light enable flexible integrated-optic circuits that are not hard-wired but can be externally controlled. Analogous to free-space spatial light modulators, we demonstrate all-optical wavefront shaping in integrated silicon-on-insulator photonic devices by modifying the spatial refractive index profile of the device employing ultraviolet pulsed laser excitation. Applying appropriate excitation patterns grants us full control over the optical transfer function of telecommunication-wavelength light travelling through the device, thus …
Programmable ultra-broadband photonic chaos platform enabled by microwave-chaos-driven electro-optic frequency combs
State Key Laboratory of Optical Field Manipulation Science and Technology, Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院光电技术研究所光场操控科学与技术重点实验室）；Research Center on Vector Optical Fields, Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院光电技术研究所矢量光学场研究中心）；Tianfu Xinglong Lake Laboratory（天府兴隆湖实验室）；College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学材料科学与光电技术学院）
Biological cells self-organize into living materials that uniquely blend structure with functionality and responsiveness to the environment. The integration of similar life-like features in man-made materials remains challenging, yet desirable to manufacture active, adaptive and autonomous systems. Here we show the self-organization of programmable random lasers from the reversible out-of-equilibrium self-assembly of colloids. Random lasing originates from the optical amplification of light undergoing multiple scattering within the dissipative colloidal assemblies and therefore is crucially de…
