A new family of ultralow loss reversible phase‐change materials for photonic integrated circuits: Sb₂S₃ and Sb₂Se₃

Phase‐change materials (PCMs) are seeing tremendous interest for their use in reconfigurable photonic devices; however, the most common PCMs exhibit a large absorption loss in one or both states. Here, Sb2S3 and Sb2Se3 are demonstrated as a class of low loss, reversible alternatives to the standard commercially available chalcogenide PCMs. A contrast of refractive index of Δn = 0.60 for Sb2S3 and Δn = 0.77 for Sb2Se3 is reported, while maintaining very low losses (k < 10−5) in the telecommunications C‐band at 1550 nm. With a stronger absorption in the visible spectrum, Sb2Se3 allows for reversible optical switching using conventional visible wavelength lasers. Here, a stable switching endurance of better than 4000 cycles is demonstrated. To deal with the essentially zero intrinsic absorption losses, a new figure of merit (FOM) is introduced taking into account the measured waveguide losses when integrating these materials onto a standard silicon photonics platform. The FOM of 29 rad phase shift per dB of loss for Sb2Se3 outperforms Ge2Sb2Te5 by two orders of magnitude and paves the way for on‐chip programmable phase control. These truly low‐loss switchable materials open up new directions in programmable integrated photonic circuits, switchable metasurfaces, and nanophotonic devices