New Molecular-Based Materials for Enabling Electro-Optical Bistability in the Silicon Photonics Platform

Electro-optical bistability is a functionality which can be crucial for a wide range of applications as it can enable non-volatile and ultra-low power switching performance. We investigate the integration of a molecular-based material presenting a Spin Crossover (SCO) effect in the silicon platform for enabling optical bistability. The SCO phenomenon involves a switching process between two molecular spin states. This spin transition comes along with a change in the optical refractive index that can be switched by different external stimuli such as a variation of temperature or light irradiation and which has a hysteretic behaviour. The SCO material can be synthetized as nanoparticles so th…