Design of an On-Chip Plasmonic Modulator Based on Hybrid Orthogonal Junctions Using Vanadium Dioxide
Gregory Beti Tanyi,
Miao Sun,
Christina Lim,
Ranjith Rajasekharan Unnithan
Affiliations
Gregory Beti Tanyi
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
Miao Sun
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
Christina Lim
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
Ranjith Rajasekharan Unnithan
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
We present the design of a plasmonic modulator based on hybrid orthogonal silver junctions using vanadium dioxide as the modulating material on a silicon-on-insulator. The modulator has an ultra-compact footprint of 1.8 μm × 1 μm with a 100 nm × 100 nm modulating section based on the hybrid orthogonal geometry. The modulator takes advantage of the large change in the refractive index of vanadium dioxide during its phase transition to achieve a high modulation depth of 46.89 dB/μm. The simulated device has potential applications in the development of next generation high frequency photonic modulators for optical communications which require nanometer scale footprints, large modulation depth and small insertion losses.
