Non-volatile photonic applications with phase-change materials

It has been a long-time dream of mankind to design materials with tailored properties. In recent years, the focus of our work has been the design of phase change materials. In today’s talk, it will be shown that only a well-defined group of materials utilizes a unique bonding mechanism (metavalent bonding), which can explain many of the characteristic features of crystalline phase change materials. In particular, we will present a novel map, which separates the known strong bonding mechanisms of metallic, ionic and covalent bonding, which provides further evidence that metavalent bonding is a novel and fundamental bonding mechanism. This insight is subsequently employed to design phase change materials for photonic applications. We will demonstrate how the optical contrast can be tuned in different regions of the spectral range, including the realization of plasmonic phase change materials.