What is it about?
Plasmonic-based integrated nanophotonic modulators, despite their promising features, have one key limiting factor of large insertion loss (IL), which limits their practical potential. To combat this, we utilize a plasmon-assisted approach through the lens of surface-to-volume ratio to realize a 4-slot based EAM with an extinction ratio (ER) of 2.62 dB/μm and insertion loss (IL) of 0.3 dB/μm operating at ∼1 GHz, and a single slot design with ER of 1.4 dB/μm and IL of 0.25 dB/μm operating at ∼20 GHz, achieved by replacing the traditional metal contact with heavily doped indium tin oxide (ITO). Furthermore, our analysis imposes realistic fabrication constraints, and material properties, and illustrates trade-offs in the performance that must be carefully optimized for a given scenario.
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Why is it important?
To reduce the loss factor in a plasmonic EO modulator for applications such as miniaturized interchip or intrachip optical interconnect for fiber communication in data centers.
Perspectives
The low loss factor comes with the tradeoff of relatively longer device length for an appreciable extinction ratio and low operating speed. I hope this work could further pave the way to improve the device design to overcome these limitations.
Mohammad Sojib
Virginia Commonwealth University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Optimizing epsilon-near-zero based plasmon assisted modulators through surface-to-volume ratio, Optics Express, May 2022, Optical Society of America (OSA),
DOI: 10.1364/oe.457063.
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