The development of photonic integrated circuits would benefit from a wider selection of materials that can strongly control near-infrared (NIR) light. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been explored extensively for visible spectrum optoelectronics; the NIR properties of these layered materials have been less-studied. The measurement of optical constants is the foremost step to qualify TMDs for use in NIR photonics. Here, we measure the complex optical constants for select sulfide TMDs (bulk crystals of MoS2, TiS2, and ZrS2) via spectroscopic ellipsometry in the visible-to-NIR range. We find that the presence of native oxide layers (measured by transmission electron microscopy) significantly modifies the observed optical constants and need to be modeled to extract actual optical constants. We support our measurements with density functional theory calculations and further predict large refractive index contrast between different phases. We further propose that TMDs could find use as photonic phase-change materials, by designing alloys that are thermodynamically adjacent to phase boundaries between competing crystal structures, to realize martensitic (i.e., displacive, order–order) switching.
