Active Control of Bound States in the Continuum in Toroidal Metasurfaces

The remarkable properties of toroidal metasurfaces, featuring ultrahigh-Q bound states in the continuum (BIC) resonances and nonradiating anapole modes, have garnered significant attention. The active manipulation of quasi-BIC resonance characteristics offers substantial potential for advancing tunable metasurfaces. This study explores explicitly the application of vanadium dioxide, a phase change material widely used in active photonics and room-temperature bolometric detectors, to control quasi-BIC resonances in toroidal metasurfaces. The phase change transition of vanadium dioxide occurs in a narrow temperature range, providing a large variation in material resistivity. Through heating thin film patches of vanadium dioxide integrated into a metasurface comprising gold split-ring resonators on a sapphire substrate, remarkable control over the amplitude and frequency of quasi-BIC resonances is achieved due to their high sensitivity to losses present in the system. Breaking the symmetry of meta-atoms reveals enhanced tunability. The predicted maximum change in the quasi-BIC resonance amplitude reaches 14 dB with a temperature variation of ≈10 °C.