Voltage-gated optics and plasmonics enabled by solid-state proton pumping

• Main Authors: Huang, Mantao (Author), Tan, Aik Jun (Author), Büttner, Felix (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020-04-13T17:50:20Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Devices with locally-addressable and dynamically tunable optical properties underpin emerging technologies such as high-resolution reflective displays and dynamic holography. The optical properties of metals such as Y and Mg can be reversibly switched by hydrogen loading, and hydrogen-switched mirrors and plasmonic devices have been realized, but challenges remain to achieve electrical, localized and reversible control. Here we report a nanoscale solid-state proton switch that allows for electrical control of optical properties through electrochemical hydrogen gating. We demonstrate the generality and versatility of this approach by realizing tunability of a range of device characteristics including transmittance, interference color, and plasmonic resonance. We further discover and exploit a giant modulation of the effective refractive index of the gate dielectric. The simple gate structure permits device thickness down to ~20 nanometers, which can enable device scaling into the deep subwavelength regime, and has potential applications in addressable plasmonic devices and reconfigurable metamaterials.