Epitaxial VO<inf>2</inf> Nanostructures: A Route to Large-Scale, Switchable Dielectric Metasurfaces

Publication Type:
Journal Article
Citation:
ACS Photonics, 2018, 5 (7), pp. 2561 - 2567
Issue Date:
2018-07-18
Filename Description Size
acsphotonics.7b01384.pdfPublished Version2.29 MB
Adobe PDF
Full metadata record
Copyright © 2018 American Chemical Society. Metasurfaces offer unparalleled functionalities for controlling the propagation and properties of electromagnetic waves. But to transfer these functions to technological applications, it is critical to render them tunable and to enable fast control by external stimuli. In most cases, this has been realized by utilizing tunable materials combined with a top-down nanostructuring process, which is often complicated and time intensive. Here we present a novel strategy for fabricating a tunable metasurface comprising epitaxially grown nanobeams of a phase transition material, vanadium dioxide. Without the need for extensive nanolithographic fabrication, we prepared a large-area (>1 cm2), deep-subwavelength (thickness of ∼Λ/40) nanostructured thin film that can control light transmission with large modulation depth, exceeding 9 dB across all telecommunication wavelength bands. Furthermore, the transmission in the "on" state remains higher than 80% from near- to mid-infrared region. This renders our metasurface useful also as a phase-shifting element, which we demonstrate by carrying out cross-polarized transmission measurements. To provide insights about the relationship between metasurface morphology and its resulting optical properties, we perform full-field three-dimensional numerical simulations as a function of width, height, and edge-to-edge separation of the epitaxial VO2 nanobeams.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: