Temperature assisted reflection control using VO2/Si core-shell nanoparticles

Abstract

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) has attracted interest due to its phase transition from the insulating to the metallic states for potential use in a variety of optical and photonic applications. Here, we propose a VO2/Si core-shell structure to improve switching in band-selective reflection properties of the composite. Mie scattering formulation is used to analyze the structure before and after phase transition to show the impact of resonance quality on the mid-infrared light back-scattering. After investigating the effect of various VO2 nano-sphere radius sizes in both phases on light reflectivity, a VO2/Si core-shell structure is proposed to boost reflectivity and improve light controllability. Randomly distributed nanoparticles are studied to illustrate how these composites have similar behavior to their deterministic-distributed counterpart. Our results indicate that up to two-thirds of incident light power can be controlled by embedding proper core-shells in a polymer host material.