INVITED PAPER, OFC Recent Advances in Low Voltage, High Frequency Polymer Electro-optic Modulators

摘要

There have been recent significant advances in the synthesis of molecules with a large electro-optic coefficient and which, in addition, have been sterically designed to prevent the large dipole-dipole interactions between the molecules from preventing the alignment of the molecules during electric field poling. One of the most promising of these is a ring-locked phenyl-tetraene bridged chromophore, (CLD). For use in electro-optic modulators the chromophore is included in a polymer host which must be low loss at 1300 nm and 1550 nm and compatible with standard photolithography. It has been particularly difficult to find host polymers with low loss at 1550 nm because, it is believed, of loss due to overtones of C-H vibration. Recently, amorphous polycarbonate (APC) [2] has been identified as a promising host material and the results with the APC/CLD polymer will be reviewed in this talk along with the latest results on amplitude modulators and other photonic devices.