Graphene nano-ribbon waveguides of recordsmall mode area and ultra-high effective refractive indices for future VLSI

• Electronics circuits keep shrinking in dimensions, as requested by Moore's law. In contrast, photonic waveguides and circuit elements still have lateral dimensions on the order of the wavelength. A key to make photonics have a microelectronics-like development is a drastic reduction of size. To achieve this, we need a low-loss nanoscale waveguide with a drastically reduced mode area and an ultra-high effective refractive index. For this purpose, we propose here several low-loss waveguide structures based on graphene nano-ribbons. An extremely small mode area (∼10-7λ0 2, one order smaller than the smallest mode area of any waveguide that has ever been reported in the literature; here λ0 is the operating wavelength in vacuum) and an extremely large effective refractive index (several hundreds) are achieved. As a device example, a nano-ring cavity of ultrasmall size (with a diameter of ∼10-2λ0) is designed. Our study paves the way for future VLSI (very-large-scale integration) optoelectronics.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)