Phase change material (PCM)-based actively tunable mid-wave IR filters have broad imaging and sensing applications—from probing molecular vibrations in chemical species to detecting radiant thermal signatures. We introduce the Phase-change actively tunable filter (P-ACTIVE) project lead by NASA Langley Research Center with collaborators MIT and the University of Cambridge. It covers background science, experimental and theoretical device performance, as well as recent results obtained from a MISSE-14 mission for space qualification of active metasurface optics and constituent PCM. We conclude with a prospective view of the technology and discuss the potential for these filters to serve multiple NASA missions.

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Hyun Jung Kim, Stephen Borg, Scott Bartram, William Humphreys, Juejun Hu, Tian Gu, Matthew Julian, and Calum Williams, "P-ACTIVE (PCM-based actively tunable filter) project at NASA," Proc. SPIE PC12514, Image Sensing Technologies: Materials, Devices, Systems, and Applications X, PC1251403 (Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing: May 01, 2023; Published: 15 June 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2655485.6328917793112.