Tunable Si-compatible Nonlinear Materials for Active Metaphotonics

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Nontechnical description: This project advances the understanding of materials with largely tunable optical properties and efficient nonlinear behavior, potentially leading to photonic devices with unique nanoscale functionalities. The research team utilizes experimental and computational approaches to help develop novel nonlinear optical materials and structures that enable controllable metallic behavior, for use in next generation power-efficient nanophotonics devices, as well as in advanced optical communications and sensing technologies on silicon chips. The project supports one graduate student and encourages the involvement of undergraduate students in the research through an outreach effort aimed at introducing fundamental concepts of materials science and optical engineering into academic curricula, alongside practical laboratory demonstrations and research activities through summer programs at Boston University. An important component of the outreach plan is to attract underrepresented minorities to a career in materials science and optical engineering through participation in the project. Finally, the outreach involves the development of a focused teaching module, addressing the structural and optical properties of photonic materials. The module is offered yearly to college students as well as practitioners both in industry and academia at the Boston University Photonics Center, and in partnership with the Nanotechnology Innovation Center at Boston University. Technical description: The primary goal of this project is to develop widely tunable, low-loss and silicon-compatible nonlinear plasmonic materials that can be utilized as engineering building blocks for the next generation of metamaterial devices integrated atop Si chips. This is achieved by controlling doping, composition and microstructural properties of transition oxides and oxynitride ceramics deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering followed by thermal annealing. The experimental three-year project addresses critical structure-property relationships that enable resonant control of plasmonic near-fields for the future development of Si-compatible tunable metaphotonics. In particular, the research utilizes high-resolution energy filtered Transmission Electron Microscopy, laboratory-based X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, optical spectroscopy and electrical characterization in order to elucidate the yet-unknown materials parameters that lead to reduced optical losses, enhanced optical nonlinearity and tunable metallic dispersion across a wide spectral range spanning the visible to the mid-infrared. In so doing, this study fills gaps in foundational materials understanding, allowing the creation of new nanostructures with unique properties and functionalities. The intellectual merit of the proposed research relies on the development of a novel platform for nonlinear optical metamaterials that can solve the long lasting problems of inefficient nonlinear signal generation, lack of tunability, thermal instability and optical losses that limit metal-based nonlinear metamaterial devices. This project enables a substantial broader impact as it provides a foundation for the next generation of highly-integrated, cost-effective active nanoplasmonic on-chip devices that are crucial components in information processing, highly-integrated nonlinear nanophotonics, optical sensing and spectroscopy.