Recirculating Light Phase Modulator
Abstract
High efficiency and a compact footprint are desired properties for electro-optic modulators. In this paper, we propose, theoretically investigate and experimentally demonstrate a recirculating phase modulator, which increases the modulation efficiency by modulating the optical field several times in a non-resonant waveguide structure. The 'recycling' of light is achieved by looping the optical path that exits the phase modulator back and coupling it to a higher order waveguide mode, which then repeats its passage through the phase modulator. By looping the light back twice, we were able to demonstrate a recirculating phase modulator that requires nine times lower power to generate the same modulation index of a single pass phase modulator. This approach of modulation efficiency enhancement is promising for the design of advanced tunable electro optical frequency comb generators and other electro-optical devices with defined operational frequency bandwidths.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.14426,
title = {Recirculating Light Phase Modulator},
author = {Haijin Huang and Xu Han and Armandas Balčytis and Aditya Dubey and Andreas Boes and Thach G. Nguyen and Guanghui Ren and Mengxi Tan and Yonghui Tian and Arnan Mitchell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.14426},
year = {2022}
}