Light: Advanced Manufacturing 2, 19 (2021)
All-dielectric metasurface analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is highly desirable for developing compact and low-loss nanophotonic devices, such as dispersion-tunable slow-light meta devices. However, it remains challenging to realize dynamic control of EIT in all-dielectric metasurfaces in the near-infrared region. To this end, researchers at the Dalian University of Technology in China have demonstrated active tuning of EIT-featuring Mie resonances in an all-dielectric metasurface based on patterned germanium antimony telluride (GST), a phase-changing material whose optical response differs significantly between the amorphous and crystalline phases. Experimentally, they have achieved a spectral tuning range of 360 nm and a relative modulation contrast of 80% at the EIT resonance wavelength by laser-induced phase switching of GST. Surprisingly, the extreme dispersion associated with the EIT resonance results in the group velocity of a near-infrared light beam 335 times slower than that in a vacuum. We anticipate that this optically tunable metasurface device can find its applications in a broad field, and the generic design approach can be extended to more comprehensive optical frequencies by using novel phase-changing materials.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Tsai, DP. Phase-change metasurface slows down light. Light Sci Appl 10, 192 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00637-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-021-00637-z
This article is cited by
-
Electrically tunable solid-state metasurfaces realized by flash localized heating
Light: Science & Applications (2023)