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Phase change materials (PCMs) have long been used as a storage medium in rewritable compact disk and later in random access memory. In recent years, integration of PCMs with nanophotonic structures has introduced a new paradigm for non‐volatile reconfigurable optics. However, the high loss of the archetypal PCM Ge₂Sb₂Te₅in both visible and telecommunication wavelengths has fundamentally limited its applications. Sb₂S₃has recently emerged as a wide‐bandgap PCM with transparency windows ranging from 610 nm to near‐IR. In this paper, the strong optical phase modulation and low optical loss of Sb₂S₃are experimentally demonstrated for the first time in integrated photonic platforms at both 750 and 1550 nm. As opposed to silicon, the thermo‐optic coefficient of Sb₂S₃is shown to be negative, making the Sb₂S₃–Si hybrid platform less sensitive to thermal fluctuation. Finally, a Sb₂S₃integrated non‐volatile microring switch is demonstrated which can be tuned electrically between a high and low transmission state with a contrast over 30 dB. This work experimentally verifies prominent phase modification and low loss of Sb₂S₃in wavelength ranges relevant for both solid‐state quantum emitter and telecommunication, enabling potential applications such as optical field programmable gate array, post‐fabrication trimming, and large‐scale integrated quantum photonic network.

Many emerging, high-speed, reconfigurable optical systems are limited by routing complexity when producing dynamic, two-dimensional (2D) electric fields. We propose a gradient-based inverse-designed, static phase-mask doublet to generate arbitrary 2D intensity wavefronts using a one-dimensional (1D) intensity spatial light modulator (SLM). We numerically simulate the capability of mapping each point in a 49 element 1D array to a distinct$7\times <\#comment/>7$2D spatial distribution. Our proposed method will significantly relax the routing complexity of electrical control signals, possibly enabling high-speed, sub-wavelength 2D SLMs leveraging new materials and pixel architectures.

We propose a nanogap-enhanced phase-change waveguide with silicon PIN heaters. Thanks to the enhanced light-matter interaction in the nanogap, the proposed structure exhibits strong attenuation (Δα = ∼35 dB/µm) and optical phase (Δn_eff = ∼1.2) modulation atλ = 1550 nm when achieving complete phase transitions. We further investigate two active optical devices based on the proposed waveguide, including an electro-absorption modulator and a 1 × 2 directional-coupler optical switch. Finite-difference time-domain simulation of the proposed modulator shows a high extinction ratio of ∼17 dB at 1550 nm with an active segment of volume only ∼0.004λ³. By exploiting a directional coupler design, we present a 1 × 2 optical switch with an insertion loss of < 4 dB and a compact coupling length of ∼ 15 µm while maintaining small crosstalk less than −7.2 dB over an optical bandwidth of 50 nm. Thermal analysis shows that a 10 V pulse of 30 ns (1×1 modulator) and 55 ns (1×2 switch) in duration is required to raise the GST temperature of the phase-change waveguide above the melting temperature to induce the amorphization; however, the complete crystallization occurs by applying a 5 V pulse of 180 ns (1×1 modulator) and a 6 V pulse of 200 ns (1×2 switch),more »respectively.