Carbon-based materials for future photonics devices. A parallel between electronics and photonics

Abstract

This paper gives a brief overview on the recent advances on photonic devices based on carbon materials such as: graphene waveguides or photonic devices on paper or plastic substrates in analogy with carbon based electronic devices. The four building block for electronics are the electrons as carrier's information's vectors, the generators, the cables and the transistors. In the same way, photonics or plasmonics will achieve in the future the capability to do same operations done actually in electronics by using photons or plasmons. Following the same steps as in electronics, new technologies were developed in photonics in order to produce photonic integrated circuits (PIC) first on silicon and more recently on plastic or paper substrates. If we analyze the present achievements we can notice that the already equivalent building blocks for photonics on paper substrates are already done: laser on paper substrate (as signal generators), optical and plasmonic waveguides (as information transport cables), optical and plasmonic transistors, photodetectors based on carbon materials etc. In this paper we present by analogy with electronics the recent advancements on paper and carbon based photonics devices. As for electronics, some of the most important advantages of these materials are that they are mechanically flexible, lightweight, cheap and environmentally friendly.