Indium-Tin-Oxide for High-performance Electro-optic Modulation
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 f...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
De Gruyter
2015-06-01
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| Series: | Nanophotonics |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2015-0006 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2192-8606 2192-8614 |