Tunable waveguiding in electrically programmable VO2-based photonic crystals.

The feasibility of electrically programmable waveguiding in a photonic crystal (PC) is explored based on the metal-insulator transition of vanadium dioxide (VO2). Unlike the ordinary PCs, wave propagation in the desired structure may be switched on/off or redirected by applying an electrical bias on the selective electrodes by taking advantage of the electrically induced VO2 phase transition and subsequent modulation of dielectric properties. The characteristics of the two-dimensional VO2-based PCs with line defects are analyzed using the iterative plane wave and finite difference time domain methods. Particularly, the influence of the Drude relaxation on waveguiding is examined as the high rate typical for metallic VO2 can lead to the signal loss. An optimized structure is proposed to minimize the loss and simplify the fabrication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]