Opportunities for adaptive devices expand with promising application of resistive switching in photonics
Opportunities for adaptive devices expand with promising application of resistive switching in photonics lead image
Resistive switching has been widely explored as a method to switch a system between a high resistive state and a low resistive state through the application of different bias voltages. Oller et al. use resistive switching to develop an “on-the-go” tunability for exploring optical rectification phenomena.
During optical rectification, a metal, such as silver, and an insulator are layered. A voltage is then applied across the metals, causing the silver to travel through the insulator. This forms a filament, which connects the two metals.
Under the right conditions, light shining on a nanogap just before this connection can convert the light into an electrical current. Current methods at exploring this suffer from lack of scalability and the impossibility to re-configure the tunneling junction on-the-go.
The authors explain resistive switching is ideally suited for exploring optical rectification phenomena under different tunneling conditions and for dynamically tuning the device’s responsivity.
After forming the filament through a resistive switching-based technique, it maintained its stability through temperature control.
“The properties of the nanogap determine what kind of response it will have to light shined on the device. For example, the size of the nanogap could change what frequency of light it responds to the most. If the nanogap properties were changed via the filamentation process, this could be used for more adaptive sensing.” Oller said.
The authors hope to improve the reproducibility of resistive switching devices and further confirm the optical rectification effect in this platform. With future research, this process can potentially be used to harvest light into usable energy.
Source: “Optical rectification in a reconfigurable resistive switching filament,” by Declan Oller, Richard Osgood III, Jimmy Xu, and Gustavo E. Fernandes, Applied Physics Letters (2019). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5091562 .
