Electrooptical Effects in Silicon

By Richard A. Soref, B. R. Bennett. IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, 2025

2,170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A numerical Kramers-Kronig analysis is used to predict the refractive-index perturbations produced in crystalline silicon by applied electric fields or by charge carriers. Results are obtained over the 1.0-2.0 \mu m optical wavelength range. The analysis makes use of experimental electroabsorption spectra and impurity-doping spectra taken from the literature. For electrorefraction at the indirect gap, we find \Delta n = 1.3 \times 10^{5} at \lambda = 1.07 \mu m when E = 10^{5} V/cm, while the Kerr effect gives \Delta n = 10^{-6} at that field strength. The charge-carrier effects are larger, and a depletion or injection of 1018carriers/cm3produces an index change of \pm1.5 \times 10^{-3} at \lambda = 1.3 \mu m.

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Citations in the corpus

Silicon Modulators and Germanium Photodetectors on SOI: Monolithic Integration, Compatibility, and Performance Optimization (2010, methodology): “concentration [34] and can be described by the Drude–Lorenz equations.”
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Silicon-Based Plasmonics for On-Chip Photonics (2010, background): “effect—two characteristics that generally yield a weak or slow continuous-wave optical response [71], [72].”
Active Components for 50 Gb/s NRZ-OOK Optical Interconnects in a Silicon Photonics Platform (2017, background): “n junction in the ring waveguide, resulting in refractive index and absorption changes in silicon [13], shifting the ring resonance wavelength to longer wavelengths.”
Silicon-Organic Hybrid Electro-Optical Devices (2013, background): “Optical losses are not only due to imperfect surfaces but also due to free-carrier absorption (FCA) from the doped strip loads.”
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Transparent conducting oxides for electro-optical plasmonic modulators (2015, background): “The refractive index changes induced by a change in the carrier concentration have been also the focus of significant research attention for decades [3, 7, 10].”