Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SubNanoOptoDevices (Sub-nanometer quantum engineering of 2D materials for optoelectronic devices)
Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2022-09-30
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 plans to develop a new technology for optoelectronic components based on low-dimensional materials to achieve increased data rates and reduced power consumption. It is exploring 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
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, is nearing completion and several important processes were optimized on the way. We completed a numerical model of the superlattices and we desined 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. Finally, our research is also advancing nanophotonics beyond the initial objectives: new types of metasurfaces have been designed to solve the issue of chromatic aberrations and will be soon fabricated and integrated with 2D materials to obtain tunability.
We succesfully created new types of polaritonic resonators using isotopically pure hexagonal boron nitride and a eometry 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.