At present, the transition from electronic to optical circuits is one of the technological challenges where material physicists and optical engineers focus their current research. The goal, to get faster and low consumption systems for applications ranging from health to digital communications. As an example, digital photonic logic circuits are key elements in the next generation of optical computers and memory devices, therefore, the development of efficient integrated switchers for building optical gates is basic. Phase Change Materials (PCM) have shown to be the key for developing this new technology. The peculiarity of these materials is that their optical properties can be controlled by an external stimulus, optical, electrical, thermal, etc. This attractive behavior, shown by a handful of chalcogenide alloys, exemplified by the Ge–Sb–Te (GST) family, has been exploited in a wide range of photonic devices including optical switches but recent research has shown that new alternative material compounds, also chalcogenide based, are able to open new possibilities for applications with more efficient photonic digital circuits. The objective of this special session intends to show the recent advances obtained with novel alternative PCM, its development and characterization in 2D and 3D configurations, and their attractive possibilities for building efficient optical devices for computation and communications. All this research is supported and framed by a recent project called PHEMTRONICS funded by the European Commission in its FET-OPEN-H2020 call.

The Participants and the Lecturers congratulated with the PHEMTRONICS consortium for gathering together in these few days the scientists worldwide involved in reconfigurable materials and metasurfaces