A Mach-Zehnder Interferometer based optical modulator composed of photonic crystals as phase shifters is presented. The switching process relies on the phase modulation along the arms of interferometer resulted from the photonic band shift of the photonic crystal regions. A small bulk index change leads to a large effective index difference between two arms of the interferometer and a small foot-print device can operate as a modulator. Presented MZI-based optical modulator is shown to have tunable bandwidth up to 15.7nm. This interesting approach provides possibility of broadband, low-voltage, low-loss, high-speed and tunable optical integrated switches, modulators and multiplexers.
A novel integrated optical modulator design is presented using zero index metamaterial-based Mach-Zehnder Interferometer with photonic crystal phase shifters. The phase modulation relies on the shift between the photonic bandgaps having non-zero and zero effective refractive indices. A small change in the bulk index results in an effective index change between the arms of the MZI due to the disturbance of the band structure. Thus, such a structure provides a new approach for phase modulation on integrated optical systems with the possibility of low insertion losses and lowvoltages.
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