High Efficiency Electro-Optic Modulation in a Graphene Silicon Hybrid Tapered Microring Resonator

Graphene silicon devices have attracted significant attention due to their outstanding electronic and optical properties. By electrically tuning the Fermi level of the monolayer graphene sheet, electro-optic (EO) modulators have been widely analyzed. Despite significant progress has been achieved on high-speed modulation with integrated graphene silicon waveguides, it remains challenging to realize a high modulation efficiency since the light absorption in graphene is limited. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a high efficiency EO modulator using a graphene-assisted tapered silicon ring resonator, where the tapered zone is covered by a graphene/graphene capacitor. This graphene-assisted tapered zone strongly enhances the graphene-light interaction that the achieved static and dynamic modulation (1KHz) depths are up to 26 dB and 12 dB, respectively. Physical mechanism of the modulation based on this nanostructure is also discussed in detail. The proposed nanostructure provides a promising alternative method for high-performance EO modulator, which is essential for the on-chip optical communication, optical computing and optical signal processing.