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Optical Materials Express Feature Announcement

Optical Phase Change Materials

Submission Opens:1 March 2018

Submission Deadline: 1 April 2018

The rapid-publication, open access, electronic OSA journal, Optical Materials Express (OMEx), is planning a feature issue on phase change materials in photonics. Papers will cover recent advances in the area of optical phase change materials and their applications in optical and photonic devices.

Optical phase change materials (O-PCMs) are unique in that they exhibit extraordinarily large optical property changes (e.g. refractive index change Δn > 1) when undergoing a phase transition. These materials, exemplified by Mott insulators, chalcogenide alloys, and nickelates, have been exploited for a plethora of emerging applications including optical switching, smart windows, adaptive optics, photonic memories, reconfigurable metasurfaces, non-volatile display, and re-programmable photonic circuits.

Topics to be covered include, but are not limited to:

  • Synthesis of novel optical phase change materials with improved performance such as increased thermal stability, larger optical contrast, rapid switch kinetics, or reduced optical loss;
  • Effect of defects or impurities on optical properties/design of defect states in PCMs to enhance or discover new functionality;
  • Modeling and characterization of phase change materials to enhance fundamental understanding of their phase change behavior and optical, thermal and electronic properties in different structural states;
  • Novel phase change material and device processing methods, including but not limited to solution processing of O-PCM thin films, integration of O-PCMs with fiber-optics and planar photonics, new methods to trigger phase transition, or in-situ techniques to characterize the material during processing and phase transformation;
  • New device design concepts and implementations leveraging the unique large optical contrast enabled by incorporation of O-PCMs toward unconventional optical functions;
  • Emerging applications of O-PCMs for optics and photonics, in bulk, fiber, or planar platforms.

All papers must present original, previously-unpublished work, and will be subject to the normal standards and peer-review process of the journal. Papers will appear in Optical Materials Express online upon acceptance.

Manuscripts must be prepared according to the usual guidelines for submission to Optical Materials Express, and should be uploaded through OSA's electronic submission system (http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ome/journal/ome/author.cfm). When submitting, please specify that the manuscript is for the Optical phase change materials feature issue (choose from the drop-down menu). The standard OMEx publication charges will apply to all published articles.

Feature Issue Organizers

Richard Haglund, Vanderbilt University, USA (Lead Editor)
Daniel Hewak, University of Southampton, UK
Shriram Ramanathan, Purdue University, USA
Juejun Hu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA