Efficient, Polarization-Diverse State Generation with Tunable Black Phosphorus Cavity Heterostructures and Active Metasurfaces
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Abstract
The dynamic, on-demand generation of different polarization states of light has diverse applications in optical communications, imaging, sensing, and quantum information processing. Such active polarization control is typically achieved using active metasurfaces or spatial light modulators based on liquid crystal media that have limited switching speeds and conversion efficiency. Layered van der Waals low-dimensional materials provide new avenues for more versatile polarization control with an operating frequency several orders of magnitude higher than that for liquid crystal devices. Here, we report the design of a heterostructure for efficient, polarization-selective free-space phase modulation or amplitude modulation by integrating electrically tunable, optically anisotropic black phosphorus (BP) into high quality factor (Q ∼ 7500 to 11000) distributed Bragg reflector-based Fabry–Perot cavities. These devices achieve a respective phase tuning range of 210° and an amplitude tuning range of 99%. We also introduce designs for BP heterostructures that employ two twisted cross-aligned BP layers that are able to access polarization states covering 75% of the Poincaré sphere from voltage tuning alone. Finally, we introduce a design for an active metasurface polarization beam splitter based on our cavity heterostructures with an electrically tunable angle of diffraction that leverages spatially engineered polarization gradients. These structures open a pathway for further structuring of light by controlling the phase and amplitude along independent orthogonal directions.
Acknowledgement
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Energy-Office of Science under grant DE-FG02-07ER46405. S.K.W.S. acknowledges support from the DSO National Laboratories Postgraduate Scholarship. S.B. acknowledges support from the Department of Energy Office of Science under grant DE-FG02-07ER46405. C.U.H. acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship grant #P2EZP2_191880 and the Postdoc Mobility grant #P500PT_214452. M.S.J. acknowledges the support by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grants funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2022R1A2C2092095, RS-2024-00414119, RS-2024-00416583).
Copyright and License
Copyright © 2025 American Chemical Society
Supplemental Material
The Supporting Information is available free of charge at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.4c01933.
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Design considerations for the devices presented, gating trajectories for amplitude and phase modulation devices, Poincaré sphere trajectories as a function of input polarization angle and wavelength, graphene conductivity and refractive index plots, reflected spectral intensity and phase plots of twisted layer device, twisted layer device results without graphene, polarization beam splitting at different diffraction angles, and additional functionalities of polarization beam splitting device (PDF)
Data Availability
All data required to evaluate the conclusions in the manuscript are available in the main text or the Supporting Information.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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Additional details
Funding
- Office of Science
- DE-FG02-07ER46405
- DSO National Laboratories
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship P2EZP2_191880
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- Postdoc Mobility P500PT_214452
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- 2022R1A2C2092095
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- RS-2024-00414119
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- RS-2024-00416583
Dates
- Accepted
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2024-12-24Accepted
- Available
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2025-02-13Published online