Slow-light-enhanced energy efficiency for the graphene microheater on silicon photonic crystal waveguides
arXiv:1607.07571 · doi:10.1038/ncomms14411
Abstract
Slow light has been widely utilized to obtain enhanced nonlinearities, enhanced spontaneous emissions, and increased phase shifts owing to its ability to promote light-matter interactions. By incorporating a graphene microheater on a slow-light silicon photonic crystal waveguide, we experimentally demonstrated an energy-efficient graphene microheater with a tuning efficiency of 1.07 nm/mW and power consumption per free spectral range of 3.99 mW. The rise and decay times (10% to 90%) were only 750 ns and 525 ns, which, to the best of our knowledge, are the fastest reported response times for microheaters in silicon photonics. The corresponding record-low figure of merit of the device was 2.543 nW.s, which is one order of magnitude lower than results reported in previous studies. The influences of the graphene-photonic crystal waveguide interaction length and the shape of the graphene heater were also investigated, providing valuable guidelines for enhancing the graphene microheater tuning efficiency.
18 pages, 4 figures
References in corpus (9)
- Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
- Ultrahigh electron mobility in suspended graphene
- Suspended Graphene: a bridge to the Dirac point
- Graphene photodetectors for high-speed optical communications
- Effective electro-optical modulation with high extinction ratio by a graphene-silicon microring resonator
- Liquid-infiltrated photonic crystals - enhanced light-matter interactions for lab-on-a-chip applications
- Slow-light enhancement of Beer-Lambert-Bouguer absorption
- Slow-light enhanced gain in active photonic crystal waveguides
- Limits of slow-light in photonic crystals