Mohammadi-Pouyan Sohrab, Bahadori-Haghighi Shahram, Heidari Mohsen, Abbott Derek
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, 71348-51154, Iran.
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, 14115-116, Iran.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 26;12(1):12738. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-17125-y.
A high-performance electro-optic Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) with outstanding characteristics is proposed. The MZM is in a push-pull configuration that is constructed using an ITO/graphene-based silicon waveguide. A novel idea for engineering of the plasma dispersion effect in an ITO/graphene-based waveguide is proposed so that the modulation characteristics of the MZM are highly improved. Plasma dispersion effects of ITO and graphene layers are tailored in such a way that a large difference between real parts of guided mode effective index of the two arms is achieved while their corresponding imaginary parts are equal. As a result, a very low [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] is achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the lowest [Formula: see text] reported for an electro-optic modulator. In addition, the proposed modulator exhibits a very high extinction ratio of more than 30 dB, low insertion loss of 2.8 dB and energy consumption of as low as 10 fJ/bit, which are all promising for optical communication and processing systems.
提出了一种具有优异特性的高性能电光马赫-曾德尔调制器（MZM）。该MZM采用推挽配置，由基于ITO/石墨烯的硅波导构成。提出了一种在基于ITO/石墨烯的波导中设计等离子体色散效应的新思路，从而极大地改善了MZM的调制特性。对ITO和石墨烯层的等离子体色散效应进行了调整，使得两臂的导模有效折射率实部之间存在很大差异，而它们相应的虚部相等。结果，实现了极低的[公式：见原文]的[公式：见原文]。据我们所知，这是电光调制器所报道的最低[公式：见原文]之一。此外，所提出的调制器具有超过30dB的非常高的消光比、2.8dB的低插入损耗以及低至10fJ/bit的能耗，这些对于光通信和处理系统都很有前景。
