Abstract
Metamaterials are artificially structured materials that can produce innovative optical functionalities such as negative refractive index, invisibility cloaking, and super-resolution imaging. Combining metamaterials with semiconductors enables us to develop novel optoelectronic devices based on the new concept of operation. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of a permeability-controlled waveguide optical modulator consisting of an InGaAsP/InP Mach-Zehnder interferometer with ‘tri-gate’ metamaterial attached on its arms. The tri-gate metamaterial consists of metal resonator arrays and triple-gate field effect elements. It changes its permeability with a change in the controlling gate voltage, thereby changing the refractive index of the interferometer arm to switch the modulator with an extinction ratio of 6.9 dB at a wavelength of 1.55 μm. The result shows the feasibility of InP-based photonic integrated devices that can produce new functions by controlling their permeability as well as their permittivity.
Highlights
Metamaterials are artificially structured materials that can produce innovative optical functionalities such as negative refractive index, invisibility cloaking, and super-resolution imaging
We report the first experimental demonstration of a permeability-controlled waveguide optical modulator consisting of an InGaAsP/InP Mach-Zehnder interferometer with ‘tri-gate’ metamaterial attached on its arms
The tri-gate metamaterial consists of metal resonator arrays and triple-gate field effect elements. It changes its permeability with a change in the controlling gate voltage, thereby changing the refractive index of the interferometer arm to switch the modulator with an extinction ratio of 6.9 dB at a wavelength of 1.55 mm
Summary
Permeability-controlled optical modulator with Tri-gate metamaterial: control of permeability on InP-based photonic integration platform. The tri-gate metamaterial consists of metal resonator arrays and triple-gate field effect elements It changes its permeability with a change in the controlling gate voltage, thereby changing the refractive index of the interferometer arm to switch the modulator with an extinction ratio of 6.9 dB at a wavelength of 1.55 mm. The permeability of semiconductor devices can be electrically changed by using the gate-controlled SRR metamaterial In this way, we can make variable-permeability devices that are compatible with InP-based photonic integration. If we set the interaction distance to be 300 nm, the p-phase shift can be obtained with the MZ arm length of 35 mm with the propagation loss lower than 0.15 dB/mm This will transform conventional optical modulators (e.g. electroabsorption modulator) into small-sized, high-performance devices for photonic integration
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