Overview

• Researchers built a heterostructure stacking aligned carbon nanotubes and germanium-antimony-tellurium phase-change films to achieve real-time modulation of circular polarization.
• Electrical pulses across the carbon nanotube layer trigger phase transitions that alter circular dichroism without affecting light amplitude or wavelength.
• The device integrates light manipulation and memory in a single platform, eliminating separate control elements and streamlining optical circuit design.
• Scalable wafer-scale manufacturing of the heterostructure demonstrates potential for practical deployment in computing, telecommunications, and data centers.
• By adding circular dichroism as an orthogonal information channel, the technology could enable massively parallel processing architectures for next-generation optical computing.