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High performance electro-optic modulator based on thin-film lithium niobate

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Abstract

Electro-optic (EO) modulator plays a very critical role in the optical communication systems. Here, we report a stimulated thin-film lithium niobate (LN) modulator with a half-wave voltage-length product of 1.8 V·cm, which can successfully achieve modulation and demodulation of a 1 GHz sinusoidal signal with an amplitude of 5 V in experiment. The optical loss caused by metal electrodes is reduced by optimizing the waveguide structure and depositing silica onto the waveguide, and group-velocity matching and characteristic impedance matching are achieved by optimizing the buffer silica layer and the electrode structure for larger bandwidth, which simultaneously improves the modulation efficiency and bandwidth performance. Our work demonstrated here paves a foundation for integrated photonics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies & Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Nano-Optoelectronic Information Materials and Devices, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Leshu Liu, Ning Liu, Jianfa Zhang, Zhihong Zhu & Ken Liu

Authors
  1. Leshu Liu
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  2. Ning Liu
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  3. Jianfa Zhang
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  4. Zhihong Zhu
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  5. Ken Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ken Liu.

Additional information

This work has been supported by the Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province (Nos.2018JJ1033 and 2017RS3039).

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The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest related to this article.

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Liu, L., Liu, N., Zhang, J. et al. High performance electro-optic modulator based on thin-film lithium niobate. Optoelectron. Lett. 18, 583–587 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11801-022-2049-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11801-022-2049-y

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