Electrically-tunable subwavelength grating using transparent conductive oxide

Abstract

Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) are getting increasing attention due to their unique epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) effect. The optical properties of TCOs can be dramatically changed from dielectric-like to metallic-like by controlling the carrier concentration in the telecommunication wavelengths, resulting in a near zero permittivity. The carrier concentration can be electrically manipulated when TCOs are built in a metal-oxide-semiconductor structure. With applied electrical bias, an accumulation layer forms at the oxide/TCO interface. When the accumulation layer meets ENZ condition, optical field is concentrated in the very thin accumulation layer, and thus the light-matter interaction is greatly enhanced. Such property makes TCOs wonderful materials for building active electro-optical devices. To data, several TCOs based devices configurations have been reported, such as metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide based modulator, Si waveguide based plasmonic MOS modulator, PlasMOStor, and TCOs based tunable metasurfaces. Here, we design and demonstrate a TCOs based tunable subwavelength grating for surface normal modulation in the telecommunication wavelengths. The device combines the TCOs MOS structure with plasmonic grating filter. When applying voltage, the light-matter interaction in the active TCOs region is further enhanced by the surface-plasmon resonances coupled guided-mode resonances (GMRs), which enables high efficient modulation for both transmission and reflection mode with only 10nm thick TCOs layer. At peak wavelength (~1.55 μm), the simulated modulation depth achieves as high as 32% for transmission mode and 56% for reflection mode.