Sub-nanometer quantum engineering of 2D materials for optoelectronic devices

Project Information

SubNanoOptoDevices

Grant agreement ID: 948250

DOI

10.3030/948250

Project terminated on 15 July 2025

EC signature date 25 August 2020

Start date 1 April 2021

End date 31 March 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 500,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 500,00

Coordinated by

FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SubNanoOptoDevices (Sub-nanometer quantum engineering of 2D materials for optoelectronic devices)

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Optoelectronic devices are at the core of today’s information revolution, bridging digital electronics and optical fibre communications. As the global internet traffic increases with a higher rate than the capacities of optical networks, new miniaturised optoelectronic technologies integrated on silicon could prove to be a powerful solution. The EU-funded SubNanoOptoDevices project paved the way to a new technology for optoelectronic components based on low-dimensional materials to achieve increased data rates and reduced power consumption. It explored a radically new way to engineer the electrical and optical properties of these materials (specifically 2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures) to achieve, for instance, optical modulators with tunable wavelengths and unprecedented modulation speeds. In conclusion, the project succesfully developed a fabrication method that can implement in a top down way structures in the order of a few nanometers in size (which can be easily extended to less than one nanometer) and proved new theoretical and experimental nanophotonic devices. It also led to the creation of a new type of finite difference numerical software with improved performances to simulate quantum mechanical and optical phenomena.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Research carried out at Italian Institute of Technology advanced significantly the state of the project: the fabrication of the superlattices, which are the main objective of the project, was successful and several important processes were optimized on the way. Notably we achieved in-plane features well below 10 nm in a perfectly reproducible top down way. We completed a numerical model of the superlattices and we designed the experiments that will be confirming the phenomena we are looking for. Several processes to fabricate nanophotonic devices based on 2D materials have been created or adapted to our facilities and we already verified experimentally the possibility of creatin a new type of polaritonic resonator. New metasurfaces and photonic crystal devices have been fabricated and tested. A software package used to simulate the nanostructures in this project has been developed for Maxwell's equations and Schrodinger's equation, and can be customized to simulate any linear system of equations in any number of dimension with advanced non-local boundary conditions. Finally, our research is also advancing nanophotonics beyond the initial objectives: new types of metalenses have been designed to solve the issue of chromatic aberrations and will be soon fabricated and integrated with 2D materials to obtain tunability.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We succesfully created new types of polaritonic resonators using isotopically pure hexagonal boron nitride and a geometry supporting Bound States in the Continuum. In this geometry we can achieve a very high quality factor using a special configuration that allows us to control the coupling of the resonant modes with impinging light. These devices have been succesfully characterized experimentally. We developed and verified numerically and experimentally new types of metasurfaces and photonic crystals. A software package developed during the project will significantly advance the state of the art in finite differnce simulations, using new types of radiation boundary conditions that allow to reduce the volume of the simulation and increase time performance and accuracy.

Reconfigurable optical devices based on 2D materials