Data communications have been growing at a speed even faster than Moore's Law, with a 44-fold increase
expected within the next 10 years. Data Transfer on such scale would have to recruit optical
communication technology and inspire new designs of light sources, modulators, and photodetectors. An
ideal optical modulator will require high modulation speed, small device footprint and large operating
bandwidth. Silicon modulators based on free carrier plasma dispersion effect and compound
semiconductors utilizing direct bandgap transition have seen rapid improvement over the past decade. One
of the key limitations for using silicon as modulator material is its weak refractive index change, which
limits the footprint of silicon Mach-Zehnder interferometer modulators to millimeters. Other approaches
such as silicon microring modulators reduce the operation wavelength range to around 100 pm and are
highly sensitive to typical fabrication tolerances and temperature fluctuations. Growing large, high quality
wafers of compound semiconductors, and integrating them on silicon or other substrates is expensive,
which also restricts their commercialization. In this work, we demonstrate that graphene can be used as the
active media for electroabsorption modulators. By tuning the Fermi energy level of the graphene layer, we
induced changes in the absorption coefficient of graphene at communication wavelength and achieve a
modulation depth above 3 dB. This integrated device also has the potential of working at high speed.
Nanoimprint lithography is used to fabricate a metamaterial with the "fishnet" structure composed of Ag/a-Si/Ag layers
that exhibits negative refractive index in the near-infrared. We have carried out a femtosecond pump-probe experiment
to measure the transient photo-induced response of this structure. With a pump fluence of 330μJ/cm2 at 800nm, the
transmission at the magnetic resonance is increased by ~15.4%. The induced change originated from carrier excitation in
the a-Si layer has a fast decay constant of 1.1ps.
Conference Committee Involvement (8)
2D Photonic Materials and Devices VIII
27 January 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices VII
30 January 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices VI
31 January 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices V
26 January 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices IV
6 March 2021 | Online Only, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices III
5 February 2020 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices II
6 February 2019 | San Francisco, California, United States
2D Photonic Materials and Devices
29 January 2018 | San Francisco, California, United States
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.