Today it is possible to engineer the building blocks of artificial materials (meta-materials) with feature sizes smaller than the wavelength of light. The ability to design meta-atoms in a largely arbitrary fashion adds a new degree of freedom in material engineering, allowing to create artificial materials with unusual electromagnetic properties rare or absent in nature. Achieving tunable, switchable and non-linear functionalities of meta-materials at individual meta-atom level could potentially lead to additional flexibility in designing active photonic devices. These include among others, meta-materials based on phase-change materials, whose properties could be altered by thermal or photo-thermal means. In this presentation, our recent results on developing appropriate numerical methods to study hybrid meta-material structures containing phase-change materials will be discussed. Meta-atoms based on plasmon polaritonic materials are considered. We develop appropriate phenomenological models of phase transition and self-consistently couple them with the full wave electromagnetic and heat transfer solvers. Developed methods are used to design meta-surface based tunable components. We demonstrate an importance of the multiphysical modelling and discuss deficiencies of the commonly used purely electromagnetic simulations approaches.

© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Sebastian Meyer and Dmitry N. Chigrin, "Design of reconfigurable meta-surfaces: modeling done right (Conference Presentation)," Proc. SPIE 10721, Active Photonic Platforms X, 107211W (Presented at SPIE Nanoscience + Engineering: August 23, 2018; Published: 17 September 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2321120.5836038578001.