Fast and low power optical modulation in metamaterials

Abstract

The quests for higher integration levels and capacity require a "Moore's Law" development for optical information technology, which in turn drives the efforts to reduce energy requirements for operations such as modulating and switching. Natural materials, however, suffers from limited change of optical index of refraction, thus limiting the size and power consumption of current optical components. In contrast, it was shown that novel designs of fishnet optical metamaterials could offer a modulation of the effective refractive index by as much as 40%, therefore promising a new generation of compact, high speed and low power optical modulators. In this talk, I will discuss the progress of optical modulation in fishnet metamaterials at telecommunication wavelength. We observed up to 12% modulation effect on these metamaterials with only 4μW pump power. Our preliminary experiments indicates that at 1.55um wavelength, the excitation source is nearly collimated with broadened near field profile, which is verified by simulation result. To optimize the modulation depth, we also conducted analysis using an effective LC circuit model. It was found that smaller capacitance and larger inductance in the effective circuit is preferred, providing new insights of improving switching ratio and lower loss on these integrated optical modulators. © OSA / META 2010.