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

Informazioni relative al progetto

SubNanoOptoDevices

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 948250

DOI

10.3030/948250

Progetto concluso il 15 Luglio 2025

Data della firma CE 25 Agosto 2020

Data di avvio 1 Aprile 2021

Data di completamento 31 Marzo 2026

Finanziato da

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Costo totale

€ 1 499 500,00

Contributo UE

€ 1 499 500,00

Coordinato da

FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA
Italy

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

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-04-01 al 2025-09-30

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

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.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

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