  Recently, chalcogenide glass based phase change materials (PCMs) have shown
utility as a tuning material for a range of nanophotonic devices. Owing to
their low loss, ultrafast switching speeds and wide waveband operation, PCMs
are integrated in an increasing number of next generation tunable components,
including integrated photonic switches, metasurface optics and tunable spectral
filters. Nonetheless, modelling of PCM-based devices is challenging, both in
terms of accurate representation of experimentally-derived material properties
in different phase states, and standardization of results across the research
community. In this work, we introduce PCMnet, an online database of the complex
refractive indices of a variety of chalcogenide glass PCMs (such as GeSbTe), as
an accessible and indexed repository for data sharing across the PCM community.
Refractive indices (n) and extinction coefficients (k) between amorphous and
crystalline states are directly extracted from experimentally-derived data in
numerous academic research articles, and collated into the material resource
database. Due to the inaccuracies associated with our data collection methods,
this data is supplemented with additional computationally-generated data,
obtained through WVASE, a commercial ellipsometry analysis software package. To
demonstrate the utility of PCMnet, we provide a NASA application-driven device
optimization example using the optical properties of PCMs collected with our
database. We anticipate the database providing great use to the PCM community
and coordinated research efforts enabled by PCMnet will promote the shared
repository for the selection of appropriate PCMs for tunable nanophotonic
device design for a range of applications.
