Photocatalytic Oxidation in Few-Layer Tellurene for Loss-Invariant Integrated Photonic Resonance Trimming

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) materials with unique physicochemical properties promote photocatalytic activities. As the 2D material composites research studies the statistical average of complex catalytic behaviors, an integrated photonic platform allows for clean and single flake level photo-catalytic investigations with precisely quantified photocatalytic activities. In this paper, fluence-dependent photo-oxidation in two-dimensional Tellurene (2D Te) is tracked by the evanescently coupled micro-resonator. Nearly 32% of oxidation is achieved in ≈10 nm 2D Te flake, compared to only 4.5% oxidation in a 30 nm sample, probed by the resonance shift in silicon micro-ring resonators substrate. The wider bandgap in the few layers of 2D Te allows faster charge transfer to adsorbed oxygen for a more efficient photocatalytic redox reaction. The photo-oxidation in hybrid 2D Te results in invariant lineshapes of optical transmission resonance for wavelength trimming (more than 3× resonance bandwidth). The low threshold power, near-infrared, and in-waveguide resonance trimming scheme is compatible with most integrated photonic setups for easy fixing of the nanofabrication-induced random resonance deviation for integrated photonic circuit applications in wavelength-division-multiplexing systems and spin qubits quantum computing.