Stoichiometric Engineering of Chalcogenide Semiconductor Alloys for Nanophotonic Applications

Abstract

A variety of alternative plasmonic and dielectric material platformsamong them nitrides, semiconductors and conductive oxides -have come to prominence in recent years as means to address the shortcomings of noble metals (including Joule losses, cost, passive character) in certain nanophotonic and optical frequency metamaterial applications. Here, we show chalcogenide semiconductor alloys offer a uniquely broad pallet of optical properties, complementary to those of existing material platforms, which can be controlled by stoichiometric design. Using combinatorial high-throughput techniques, we explore the extraordinary epsilon-near-zero, plasmonic and low/high-index characteristics of Bi:Sb:Te (BST) alloys: Depending upon composition they can for example: have plasmonic figures of merit higher than conductive oxides and nitrides across the entire UV-NIR range, and higher than gold below 550 nm; present dielectric figures of merit better than conductive oxides at near-infrared telecommunications wavelengths; and exhibit record-breaking refractive indices as low as 0.7 and as high as 11.5.

High‐throughput computational materials screening and discovery of optoelectronic semiconductors

“…DFT based high-throughput (HT) computational screening of both the optoelectronic energy materials and the information optoelectronic materials has shown a clear advantage most likely due to the high screening efficiency and achieving more quantitative structure-property relationships. In addition, some recent works of HT computational materials screening and discovery have successfully predicted some novel optoelectronic energy/information materials, including Sn 2 Sb 2 S The increasing experimental [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] and theoretical 10,16,37,38 efforts toward optoelectronic semiconductors lead to the expansion of material databases, providing enough data as initial input parameters for the HT computational screening and discovery process. Exploiting the capabilities of current high-performance supercomputers and using the existing material databases allows the HT computational screening and discovery process to perform effective simulations of thousands of virtual materials, most notably, optoelectronic semiconductors.…”

Plasmon-induced transparency effect for ultracompact on-chip devices

“…Thus, some phase-changed materials such as widely used chalcogenides and vanadium oxide can also be considered as building blocks for PIT devices. Based on the pump excitations, they can provide nonvolatile tunability, which is vital for the applications in optical memory and buffers [165,166]. The 2D materials also have potentials for designing PIT structures.…”

Spectrally Tailored Light‐Matter Interaction in Lithography‐Free Functional Nanomaterials

“…[33] In a similar way, strong interband transitions were proposed to be an important cause of the negative ε 1 values in the visible for a broader gamut of alternative plasmonic materials from the p block of periodic table: Sb and [30] Ga in its solid α phase and [30,34] Te, Bi, Sb and their binary and ternary chalcogenides. [35][36][37] Figure 4. Switchable plasmon resonances of self-assembled VO 2 elongated nanoparticles grown by epitaxial deposition.…”

“…This demonstrates the potential of PbTe nanoparticles for noncontact thermometry. [54] On top of the interband plasmonic materials chart are those based on Bi and Sb (single-element materials and their chalcogenides [31,36,37] ). Their giant interband transitions enable their refractive index to reach giant values.…”

“…Such ε 1 % 0 conditions are found also at the vicinity of phonon absorption bands in the infrared. [58] Some interband plasmonic [36,59] or nanocomposite [40] materials were called double ENZ materials, because their dielectric function displays two crossover wavelengths above the interband transitions (see Figure 5a in the case of Bi). Therefore, controlling the spectral range where Berreman or ENZ optical absorption occurs requires tuning the wavelengthdependent dielectric function of the nanofilm to shift the crossover wavelengths.…”