Indium-Tin-Oxide for High-performance Electro-optic Modulation

By Zhizhen Ma, Z. Li, Ke Liu, Chenran Ye, Volker J. Sorger. 2015

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract: Advances in opto-electronics are often led by discovery and development of materials featuring unique properties. Recently, the material class of transparent conductive oxides (TCO) has attracted attention for active photonic devices on-chip. In particular, indium tin oxide (ITO) is found to have refractive index changes on the order of unity. This property makes it possible to achieve electrooptic modulation of sub-wavelength device scales, when thin ITO films are interfaced with optical light confinement techniques such as found in plasmonics; optical modes are compressed to nanometer scale to create strong light-matter interactions. Here we review efforts towards utilizing this novel material for high performance and ultra-compact modulation. While high performance metrics are achieved experimentally, there are open questions pertaining to the permittivity modulation mechanism of ITO. Finally, we review a variety of optical and electrical properties of ITO for different processing conditions, and show that ITO-based plasmonic electro-optic modulators have the potential to significantly outperform diffractionlimited devices.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fd9c87119f7551ad3e8fa82b60cd9522cdc1936