R. G. Herb Condensed Matter Seminars |
We create tunable optical components for the mid-IR by incorporating materials that respond to temperature, current, or applied electric field into photonic structures such as interference coatings and optical metasurfaces. In particular, we exploited the insulator-to-metal phase transition of vanadium dioxide (VO2) to create temperature- and current-tunable modulators and thermal emitters, and used electrostatic doping in graphene to construct reconfigurable metasurfaces that operate at nanosecond time scales.