Plasmonic electro-absorption modulator and polarization selector

Silicon photonics has begun to use index tunable plasmonic materials, such as graphene and indium tin oxide (ITO), because these materials can have their properties tailored by an external voltage. In this article, a compact plasmonic device, which can work as an optical mode controller and electro-absorption (EA) modulator at 1550 nm, is proposed. The performance of the device is theoretically investigated for ITO. Numerical simulations show that, with a suitable applied voltage to thin ITO layers, the proposed structure can select either only one mode (TE/TM) or both modes initially and then modulate the selected mode: a modulation depth of about 30–50 dB/μm is achieved with a proper choice of the dielectric spacer material. In addition, the proposed structure performance is analysed by replacing the waveguide materials with germanium. The proposed nanoscale device, with high modulation bandwidth (f_3 dB = 700–250 GHz) and low-energy consumption (~4.0 fJ/bit), may find applications in the future integrated nanophotonics.