High Extinction Ratio 4 × 2 Encoder Based on Electro-Optical Graphene Plasma Structure

Abstract

In this paper, a plasmonic electro-optical encoder based on graphene at THz frequency is proposed. The surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in the graphene–insulator–metal structure are excited by an incident TM wave with a wavelength of 9.3 μm. Graphene plasma waveguides have extremely high confinement, relatively low losses, and high tunability. The switching mechanism is based on the application of an external voltage to locally change the chemical potential of the graphene for encoding. Setting the chemical potential to 1 eV allows SPPs to propagate while lowering the chemical potential to 0.1 eV prevents the SPPs from propagating. A 4 × 2 encoder with a minimum encoding extinction ratio (ER) of 37 dB, a maximum modulation depth (MD) of 99.99%, and a structure area of 0.8 μm2 is proposed based on the design rules and simulations using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In terms of the obtained results, the proposed structure can be used in optical integrated circuits.