Tunable Light Filtering in a Bragg Mirror/Heavily-Doped Semiconducting Nanocrystal Composite

Abstract: Tunable light filters are critical components for many optical applications in which light in-coupling, out-coupling or rejection is crucial, such as lasing, sensing, photovoltaics and information and communication technology. For this purpose, Bragg mirrors, band-pass filters with high reflectivity represent good candidates. However, their optical characteristics are determined at the stage of fabrication. Heavily doped semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) on the other hand deliver a high degree of optical tunability through the active modulation of their carrier density ultimately influencing their plasmonic absorption properties. Here, we propose the design of a tunable light filter composed of a Bragg mirror and a layer of plasmonic semiconductor NCs. We demonstrate that the filtering properties of the coupled device can be tuned to cover a wide range of frequencies from the visible to the near infrared (vis-NIR) spectral region when employing varying carrier densities. As tunable component we implemented a dispersion of copper selenide (Cu2-xSe) NCs and a film of indium tin oxide (ITO) NCs, which are known to show optical tunablility by chemical or electrochemical treatments. We utilized the Mie theory to describe the carrier dependent plasmonic properties of the Cu2-xSe NC dispersion and the effective medium theory to describe the optical characteristics of the ITO film. The transmission properties of the Bragg mirror have been modelled with the transfer matrix method. We foresee ease of experimental realization of the coupled device, where filtering modulation is achieved upon chemical and electrochemical post-fabrication treatment of the heavily doped semiconductor NC component, eventually resulting in tunable transmission properties of the coupled device.