Design, fabrication, and characterization of an optofluidic phase modulator array based on the piezoelectric effect.

Abstract

In this paper, an optofluidic phase modulator array based on the piezoelectric effect is designed, fabricated, and characterized. This array is composed of three piezoelectric ceramics arranged on the vertices of an equilateral triangle. A transparent liquid fills the inner cavity of the ceramics. Due to the inverse piezoelectric effect, the length of the transparent liquid is changed at different voltages, which contributes to the optical phase modulation. According to experiment results, it is found that our modulator arrays exert continuous optical phase adjustment ability. When the voltage ranges from 0 to 135 V, the relative length variation reaches up to 9.286 µm, and consequently our proposed modulator arrays perform about 9.685 π optical phase modulation.