Optical modulators are vital for many applications, including telecommunication, data communication, optical computing, and microwave photonic links. A compact modulator with low voltage drive requirement, low power, high speed, and compatibility with CMOS foundry process is highly desirable. Current modulator technologies in Si suffer from trade-offs that constrain their power, performance (speed, drive voltage), and area. The introduction of additional materials to the silicon platform for efficient phase shift promises alternatives to relax those trade-offs. Si-organic-hybrid (SOH) devices demonstrate large modulation bandwidth leveraging the electro-optic (EO) effect and smaller drive voltage or footprint owing to a strong EO coefficient. In this study, we review various SOH modulators and describe their path towards integration to silicon, including their challenges associated with aging and temperature. We also briefly discuss other high-performance modulators such as plasmonic-organic-hybrid (POH), photonic-crystal-assisted SOH, and LiNbO3.

In this paper, we propose a terahertz (THz) plasmonic structure that supports three resonance modes, including the charge transfer plasmon (CTP), the bonding dipole-dipole plasmon, and the antibonding dipole-dipole plasmon, which can be strongly tuned by geometrical parameters, passively, and the temperature, actively. The structure exhibits a considerable thermal sensitivity of more than 0.01 THz/K. The introduced multiband and tunable THz plasmonic structures offer important applications in thermal switches, thermo-optical modulators, broadband filters, design of multifunctional molecules originating from the multiband specification of the proposed structure, and improvement in plasmonic sensor applications stemming from a detailed study of the CTP mode.

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A plasmonic structure based on Indium Antimonide for sensing applications has been investigated. We have used FDTD simulations for evaluating both scattering cross-section of the proposed structure and transmission spectra for its periodic array.