High-performance tunable resonant electro-optical modulator based on suspended graphene waveguides

Abstract

The exceptional tunable waveguiding characteristics of graphene surface plasmons have remained unrivaled since it has inspired many electro-optical (EO) devices in terahertz (THz) and mid-infrared (MIR) photonic circuits. We propose and numerically investigate a low-loss, highly extinctive resonant EO modulator based on a suspended graphene plasmonic waveguide. Unlike other resonance-based modulators, the input power has negligible interaction with lossy resonance cavity in on-state, remarkably reducing the losses. Achieving the insertion loss (IL) of 1.3 dB and the extinction ratio (ER) of 22 dB within a footprint less than 3 µm2 substantiates the superiority of the proposed structure. The charge transport simulations are first conducted to calculate the steady-state charge distribution. The three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (3D-FDTD) method is utilized to monitor the guided wave propagation and modulation properties. We show that the transmission spectrum is highly dependent upon geometric parameters of the structure, and the modulator can be effectively tuned to operate at the desired wavelength by applying a suitable gate voltage. Simulation results show the modulation bandwidth of 71 GHz corresponding to the total capacitance of 4.8 fF within the active area. The novel EO modulator structure has shown great potentiality and flexibility to find other applications in MIR and THz integrated circuits like controllable notch filters and switches.

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