Independent tuning of bright and dark meta-atoms with phase change materials on EIT metasurfaces

The realization of tunable metasurfaces is of fundamental importance for boosting the electromagnetic field control ability. Especially, it is important to put forward new modulation methods to further understand their underlying modulation mechanism and expand their application range. In this paper, tunable electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) metasurfaces based on the phase change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) are proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Different from previous modulation methods of directly introducing the GST film below the metasurfaces, here a two-step lithography method is introduced to combine independent GST strips with bright and dark meta-atoms in the EIT structures, respectively, achieving the independent modulation of the EIT-like spectra. In addition, by applying temporal coupled-mode theory (TCMT), the EIT-like spectra with different GST crystallization levels were analysed and the corresponding characteristic parameters were determined simultaneously. These fitting results reveal that GST strips can modulate the resonances of the bright and dark meta-atoms independently by shifting the resonant frequency and increasing the decay rate, which in turn result in the different modulation features of the EIT-like spectra. This method improves the degree of freedom of active modulation and provides a new route for tunable slow light devices.