Design rules for active control of narrowband thermal emission using phase-change materials

Abstract

We propose an analytical framework to design actively tunable narrowband thermal emitters at infrared frequencies. We exemplify the proposed design rules using phase-change materials (PCM), considering dielectric-to-dielectric PCMs (e.g. GSST) and dielectric-to-metal PCMs (e.g. $\mathrm{V}{\mathrm{O}}_2$). Based on these, we numerically illustrate near-unity ON-OFF switching and arbitrarily large spectral shifting between two emission wavelengths, respectively. The proposed systems are lithography-free and consist of one or several thin emitter layers, a spacer layer which includes the PCM, and a back reflector. Our model applies to normal incidence, though we show that the behavior is essentially angle-independent. The presented formalism is general and can be extended to \textit{any} mechanism that modifies the optical properties of a material, such as electrostatic gating or thermo-optical modulation.

11 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Control over emissivity of zero-static-power thermal emitters based on phase changing material GST
• Tunable light-matter interaction and the role of hyperbolicity in graphene-hBN system
• Infrared Reflectance Spectrum of BN Calculated from First Principles
• Infrared Frequency-Tunable Coherent Thermal Sources

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Lithography-free directional control of thermal emission
• Dispersion engineering of infrared epsilon-near-zero modes by strong coupling to optical cavities