Antimony Trisulfide Programmable Photonics—From Local Structural Transitions to Programmable Photonics

Chalcogenides that exhibit substantial property contrast between different structural phases are of interest for data storage and programmable photonics applications. The most successful data storage materials, such as those that lie along the GeTe-Sb2Te3 pseudo-binary compositional tie-line, have a small bandgap and concomitantly, a large optical absorption in the near infrared and visible wavelengths. New phase change materials with a wider bandgap need to be developed for the visible and N-IR photonics applications.<br/>Antimony trisulfide (Sb2S3) is an Earth abundant material that is transparent to visible and near infrared light (N-IR). Switching the material between amorphous and crystalline states causes radical property changes that deem it useful for programming the response of visible and N-IR photonics devices. We have demonstrated how Sb2S3 can be used to program high resolution micro-displays, dielectric metasurfaces, hyperbolic metamaterials, waveguides, and all-optical neural networks. This presentation will discuss these demonstrations and the underlying structural transitions that are responsible for the property contrast in Sb2S3.