Chalcogenide materials could enable faster data streaming

These materials promise to bridge the gap between glasses such as fibre optics and semiconductors such as silicon — potentially resulting in faster data streaming and more efficient solar cells, among many other applications.

‘With chalcogenides we can form the material into fibres, thin films, microspheres, nanophotonics — anything that you can make glass in to, but they also have the electronic properties of semiconductors, so it’s almost a marriage of the two worlds,’ said Prof Dan Hewak, of Southampton University, who leads a team aiming at building new devices.

Chalcogenides, which are based on sulphur, selenium or tellurium, have been used as thin films for niche applications such as rewritable optical discs and non-volatile memory devices for a number of decades now.

But to realise their full potential as semiconductors, as well as optical materials, they must be doped to control certain properties of the material through a process called ion implantation, which the team has recently demonstrated. Immediate applications would likely be in the field of telecommunications, Hewak explained.