Tunable hyperbolic metamaterials utilizing phase change heterostructures

Abstract

We present a metal-free tunable anisotropic metamaterial where the iso-frequency surface is tuned from elliptical to hyperbolic dispersion by exploiting the metal-insulator phase transition in the correlated material vanadium dioxide (VO2). Using VO2-TiO2 heterostructures, we demonstrate the transition in the effective dielectric constant parallel to the layers to undergo a sign change from positive to negative as the VO2 undergoes the phase transition. The possibility to tune the iso-frequency surface in real time using external perturbations such as temperature, voltage, or optical pulses creates new avenues for controlling light-matter interaction.