Nanoscale Graphene Electro-Optic Modulators

Abstract

Research on graphene has revealed its unique optical properties, including strong coupling with light, high-speed operation, and gate-variable optical conductivity, which promise to satisfy the needs of future electro-optic (EO) modulators. In particular, recent work demonstrated a broadband EO modulator based on the interband absorption of graphene with overall length only 40μm. However, compared with the size of on-chip electronic components it is still bulky. On-chip optical interconnects require EO modulation at the nanoscale. The key to achieve nanoscale graphene EO modulation is to greatly enhance light-graphene interaction based on novel waveguides and platforms. Herein, we present our recent exploration of graphene EO modulators based on graphene sandwiched in dielectric or plasmonic waveguides. With a suitable gate voltage, the dielectric constant of graphene can be tuned to be very small due to the effect of intraband electronic transition, resulting in "graphene-slot waveguides" and greatly enhanced absorption modes. Up to 3-dB modulation depth can be achieved within 800nm long silicon waveguides, or 120nm long plasmonic waveguides based on small signal analysis. They have the advantages of nanoscale footprints, small insertion loss, low power consumption, and potentially ultrahigh speed, as well as being CMOS-compatible.