Photonic components with adjustable parameters, such as variable-focal-length lenses or spectral filters, which can change functionality upon optical stimulation, could offer numerous useful applications. Tuning of such components is conventionally achieved by either micro- or nanomechanical actuation of their constituent parts, by stretching or by heating. Here, we report a novel approach for making reconfigurable optical components that are created with light in a non-volatile and reversible fashion. Such components are written, erased and rewritten as two-dimensional binary or greyscale patterns into a nanoscale film of phase-change material by inducing a refractive-index-changing phase transition with tailored trains of femtosecond pulses. We combine germanium-antimony-tellurium-based films with a diffraction-limited resolution optical writing process to demonstrate a variety of devices: visible-range reconfigurable bichromatic and multi-focus Fresnel zone plates, a super-oscillatory lens with subwavelength focus, a greyscale hologram, and a dielectric metamaterial with on-demand reflection and transmission resonances.
CITATION STYLE
Wang, Q., Rogers, E. T. F., Gholipour, B., Wang, C. M., Yuan, G., Teng, J., & Zheludev, N. I. (2016). Optically reconfigurable metasurfaces and photonic devices based on phase change materials. Nature Photonics, 10(1), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2015.247
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