The Potential of Combining Thermal Scanning Probes and Phase-Change Materials for Tunable Metasurfaces

Metasurfaces allow for the spatiotemporal variation of amplitude, phase, and polarization of optical wavefronts. Implementation of active tunability of metasurfaces promises compact flat optics capable of reconfigurable wavefront shaping. Phase-change materials (PCMs), such as germanium telluride or germanium antimony telluride, are a prominent material class enabling reconfigurable metasurfaces due to their large refractive index change upon structural transition. However, commonly employed laser-induced switching of PCMs limits the achievable feature sizes and thus, restricts device miniaturization. Here, we propose thermal scanning-probe-induced local switching of germanium telluride to realize near-infrared metasurfaces with feature sizes far below what is achievable with diffraction-limited optical switching. Our design is based on a planar multilayer stack and does not require fabrication of protruding dielectric or metallic resonators as commonly applied in the literature. Instead, we numerically demonstrate that a broad-band tuning of perfect absorption could be realized by the localized and controlled tip-induced crystallization of the PCM layer. The spectral response of the metasurface is explained using simple resonance mode analysis and numerical simulations. To facilitate experimental realization, we provide a detailed theoretical description of the tip-induced crystallization employing multiphysics simulations to demonstrate the great potential for fabricating compact reconfigurable metasurfaces. Our concept allows for tunable perfect absorption and can be applied not only for thermal imaging or sensing, but also for spatial frequency filtering.