Abstract
Graphene has attracted the interest of researchers seeking to develop compact optical modulators with the flexible tunability of graphene conductivity by tuning the Fermi level. Plasmonic structures have provided a robust way to enhance the modulation depth (MD) of graphene optical modulators, but the available schemes suffer from low MD, fabrication complexities, or both. Here, an ultra-thin plasmonic metasurface structure capable of guiding slow surface plasmons (SPs) is proposed to construct graphene-based optical modulators. The designs take advantage of the strong field enhancement of slow SP modes as well as the orientation match between the electric field and the graphene plane. A typical 0.96-μm-long metasurface-based graphene modulator presents a significantly improved MD of 4.66 dB/μm and an acceptable insertion loss of 1.4 dB/μm, while still having ease of fabrication.
© 2019 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Yulin Wang, Tao Li, and Shining Zhu
Opt. Lett. 42(12) 2247-2250 (2017)
Ran Hao, Jianyao Jiao, Xiliang Peng, Zheng Zhen, Rakhatbek Dagarbek, Yijun Zou, and Erping Li
Opt. Lett. 44(10) 2586-2589 (2019)
Hua Zhu, Ming Deng, Shuqi Chen, and Lin Chen
Opt. Lett. 44(13) 3382-3385 (2019)