Design of an on-chip Vanadium Dioxide driven Plasmonic Modulator Based on Hybrid Orthogonal Junctions on Silicon-on-Insulator

We present a plasmonic modulator using a hybrid orthogonal coupling geometry with vanadium dioxide as the modulation material on a silicon-on-insulator platform. The presented device is compact with a nanoscale modulating area and takes advantage of the first order insulator to metal transition of vanadium dioxide to achieve a high modulation depth of 46.89dB/μm. The device has applications in integrated high speed communications systems which require a high modulation depth as well as small device sizes.