Abstract
A graphene-embedded waveguide (GEW) with improved modulation capability was proposed, which can be over 2 times larger than that of conventional graphene-on-silicon (GOS) waveguide. More importantly, it is found that the improvement of modulation capability mainly results from the enhanced electric field confinement around graphene. Based on this finding, we propose a high-efficient method to optimize the modulation capability. By using this method, the optimization work can be reduced by an order of magnitude. Our work may promote the design of graphene-based electro-optic modulator with high modulation capability.
Keywords
In current integrated optoelectronic circuits, electro-optic modulator is an essential component performing electro-optic conversion. For the modulator based on electro-absorption (EA) effect, the modulation is realized by tuning the absorption of the waveguide. Hence, the performance of EA modulator depends on the change of propagation loss per unit length, i.e. the amplitude modulation capability (AMC). For the modulator based on electro-refraction (ER) effect, the modulation is realized by tuning the propagation phase to control the resonance
In order to reduce the footprint of electro-optic modulator, the GOS waveguide modulator has been proposed due to its enhanced AMC (~ 0.07 dB/μm) and PMC (~1.1 deg/μm)
In this work, a GEW with improved AMC and PMC is proposed. The AMC and PMC of GEW can be 3 and 2 times larger than those of traditional GOS waveguide respectively. The improvement is achieved by enhancing the electric field confinement around graphene. As a result, the footprint of the modulator based on GEW can be more compact than that based on GOS. Moreover, a high-efficient method to optimize the AMC and PMC of GEW is proposed. Based on this method, the optimization work can be cut down by an order of magnitude.
The structure of GEW is shown in

Fig. 1 (a) The schematic diagram of the GEW, (b) in-plane electric field distribution for TE mode, and (c)out-of-plane electric field distribution for TE mode
图1 (a) GEM的示意图,(b) TE模式的面内电场分布,(c) TE模式的面外电场分布
When the TE mode propagates along GEW, its loss per micron and phase change per micron can be expressed as
, | (1) |
and
, | (2) |
respectively, where is the wavelength, is the effective mode index of TE mode. Furthermore, the AMC and PMC of GEW can be expressed as
, | (3) |
and
, | (4) |
where is the change of effective mode index induced by the variation of . According to electromagnetic theory
. | (5) |
In
, | (6) |
where, and. Because the electric field integration in graphene is much smaller than the sum of electric field integration in the whole waveguide, will approach 0. Based on the Taylor’s series expansion, the can be approximated as
. | (7) |
Because of the ultrathin thickness of graphene, it is assumed that the variation of graphene permittivity nearly does not change the field distribution. Therefore, can be expressed as
. | (8) |
By substituting
, | (9) |
and
, | (10) |
respectively. Since most of the electric field is in the silicon region, is estimated to be near the refractive index of silicon. According to Eqs.
In order to optimize the AMC and PMC of GEW, a sweep of the geometrical parameters including the waveguide height HGEW and the chemical potential of graphene under different waveguide width WGEW is taken. In the following discussion, graphene is set to be at the center of silicon while sweeping HGEW ranging from 100 nm to 800 nm with an increase step of 20 nm and ranging from 0 eV to 1 eV with an increase step of 0.05 eV. The and field distribution are obtained from numerical simulation. Then the AMC, PMC and can be calculated with Eqs.
In traditional method, locally maximum AMC and PMC at each HGEW need to be found by sweeping
In order to relieve the simulation burden, a high-efficient optimization method based on the physical understanding of MC is proposed. On the one hand, AMC and PMC mainly depend on and as

Fig. 2 The AMC (red circle) and (blue square) varies with the HGEW at (a) WGEW =300 nm, (b) WGEW =400 nm; (c) WGEW =500 nm, (d) WGEW =600 nm, (e) WGEW =700 nm, (f) WGEW =800 nm
图2 AMC(红色圆圈)和κ(蓝色正方形)随着HGEW改变而变化 (a) WGEW =300 nm,(b) WGEW =400 nm,(c) WGEW =500 nm,(d) WGEW =600 nm,(e) WGEW =700 nm,(f) WGEW =800 nm

Fig. 3 The PMC (red circle) and (blue square) varies with the HGEW at (a) WGEW=300 nm, (b) WGEW =400 nm, (c) WGEW =500 nm, (d) WGEW =600 nm, (e) WGEW =700 nm, (f) WGEW =800 nm
图3 PMC(红色圆圈)和κ(蓝色正方形)随着HGEW的改变而变化 (a) WGEW =300 nm,(b) WGEW =400 nm,(c) WGEW =500 nm,(d)WGEW=600 nm,(e)WGEW=700 nm,(f)WGEW=800 nm
In
Similar high-efficient optimization method can also be used to optimize the PMC as
, | (11) |
where L=100μm is length of interferometer arms, and are the of the two arm

Fig. 4 (a) The schematic diagram of MZI based on optimized GEW (WGEW=800 nm, HGEW =100 nm), (b) Transmission of MZI based on the optimized GEW as a function of the applied voltage
图4 (a)基于优化后GEM的MZI调制器原理图(WGEW=800 nm, WGEW =100 nm),(b) 基于优化后GEM的MZI调制器,其传输率将随着石墨烯上的电压| Vg+V0 |的变化而改变
In order to improve the modulation efficiency further, the structure which can provide larger should be used. As reported in previous study
In summary, the physical understanding for the modulation capability (including AMC and PMC) of GEW is provided in this paper. The normalized changeable electric displacement field is found to be the main determining factor for the modulation capability. Based on this finding, a high-efficient method to optimize the modulation capability is proposed. By using the proposed optimization method instead of traditional method, the simulation time and storage space can be cut down by at least 1 order of magnitude. After optimization, the AMC or PMC of GEW can be over 3 or 2 times larger than those of a typical GOS waveguide respectively. Hence, a more compact or energy-efficient modulator can be achieved. This work may pave the way for designing graphene-based electro-optic modulator with large modulation capability.
Here, graphene is modeled as an anisotropic material. Its out-of-plane relative permittivity is 2.5 and in-plane relative permittivity is
, | (12) |
where is the surface conductivity of graphene, is the angular frequency, =0.34 nm is the thickness of graphene and is the permittivity in free space
, | (13) |
where is the charge of electron, is the reduced Planck’s constant, is the scattering rate and is the Fermi-Dirac function
, | (14) |
where is the chemical potential of graphene, is the Boltzmann constant and =300 K is the temperature
, | (15) |
where is estimated with a parallel-plate capacitor model, is the Fermi velocity, is the driven voltage and is the voltage offset due to natural doping
According to Eqs.

Fig. 5 The real part of (green triangle), the imaginary part of (red square) and the chemical potential of graphene (blue circle)
图5 ε∥的实部(绿色三角形),ε∥的虚部(红色正方形)以及石墨烯的化学式μc(蓝色圆圈)
References
Zhou F, Wen H. Performance analysis and optimization of TM/TE independent graphene ring modulator [J]. Optical and Quantum Electronics, 2021, 53(8):1-10. 10.1007/s11082-021-03080-x [Baidu Scholar]
Shekhawat D, Mehra R. Design of ultra-compact and highly-sensitive graphene assisted silicon micro-ring resonator modulator for switching applications [J]. Silicon, 2021:1-8. 10.1109/i2ct51068.2021.9418066 [Baidu Scholar]
Xue H, Guo S, Li Z, et al. Tunable Fano resonance based on graphene U-shaped double-microring resonator [J]. Optical Engineering, 2020, 59(12):127104. 10.1117/1.oe.59.12.127104 [Baidu Scholar]
Zhou F, Liang C. Highly tunable and broadband graphene ring modulator [J]. Journal of Nanophotonics, 2019, 13(1):016008. 10.1117/1.jnp.13.016008 [Baidu Scholar]
Ghods M M, Afsahi M. Design and simulation of the optical amplitude-shift keying modulator using Fabry–Perot resonator coupled with graphene at near-infrared frequencies [J]. Journal of Nanophotonics, 2021, 15(2):026006. 10.1117/1.jnp.15.026006 [Baidu Scholar]
CHEN R G, LIN R, SHEN L M, et al. 3-μm mid-infrared polarization-independent and CMOS-compatible graphene modulator [J]. Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves(陈荣国,林瑞,沈黎明,等。3-μm中红外偏振无关且CMOS兼容的石墨烯调制器,红外与毫米波学报), 2021, 40(3):297. [Baidu Scholar]
Armaghani S, Khani S, Danaie M. Design of all-optical graphene switches based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing optical Kerr effect [J]. Superlattices and Microstructures, 2019, 135:106244. 10.1016/j.spmi.2019.106244 [Baidu Scholar]
Thomson D J, Gardes F Y, Fedeli J-M, et al. 50-Gb/s silicon optical modulator [J]. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 2011, 24(4):234-6. 10.1109/lpt.2011.2177081 [Baidu Scholar]
Phatak A, Cheng Z, Qin C, et al. Design of electro-optic modulators based on graphene-on-silicon slot waveguides [J]. Optics letters, 2016, 41(11):2501-4. 10.1364/ol.41.002501 [Baidu Scholar]
Hao R, Jiao J, Peng X, et al. Experimental demonstration of a graphene-based hybrid plasmonic modulator [J]. Optics letters, 2019, 44(10):2586-9. 10.1364/ol.44.002586 [Baidu Scholar]
Liu J, Khan Z U, Wang C, et al. Review of graphene modulators from the low to the high figure of merits [J]. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2020, 53(23): 233002. 10.1088/1361-6463/ab7cf6 [Baidu Scholar]
Liu J, Khan Z U, Sarjoghian S. Metal-clad-suspended self-biasing graphene modulator with tunable figure of merit [J]. Journal of Optics, 2020, 49(3): 364-9. 10.1007/s12596-020-00616-4 [Baidu Scholar]
Karimkhani H, Vahed H. Hybrid broadband optical modulator based on multi-layer graphene structure and silver nano-ribbons [J]. Optical and Quantum Electronics, 2020, 52(5):1-11. 10.1007/s11082-020-02354-0 [Baidu Scholar]
Cheng Z, Zhu X, Galili M, et al. Double-layer graphene on photonic crystal waveguide electro-absorption modulator with 12 GHz bandwidth [J]. Nanophotonics, 2020, 9(8):2377-85. [Baidu Scholar]
Najafi-hajivar M, Hosseini-Farzad M. Broadband polarization-insensitive amplitude and phase modulators based on graphene-covered buried and ridge silicon waveguides [J]. Optics Communications, 2020, 472:125860. 10.1016/j.optcom.2020.125860 [Baidu Scholar]
Jiao J, Hao R, Zhen Z, et al. Optimization of graphene-based slot waveguides for efficient modulation [J]. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 2019, 26(2):1-5. 10.1109/jstqe.2019.2941469 [Baidu Scholar]
Peng X, Hao R, Ye Z, et al. Highly efficient graphene-on-gap modulator by employing the hybrid plasmonic effect [J]. Optics Letters, 2017, 42(9):1736-9. 10.1364/ol.42.001736 [Baidu Scholar]
Zhu Y, Deng C, Huang L, et al. Hybrid plasmonic graphene modulator with buried silicon waveguide [J]. Optics Communications, 2020, 456:124559. 10.1016/j.optcom.2019.124559 [Baidu Scholar]
Chakraborty I, Roy S, Dixit V, et al. Atto-joule energy-efficient graphene modulator using asymmetric plasmonic slot waveguide [J]. Photonics and Nanostructures-Fundamentals and Applications, 2021, 43:100865. 10.1016/j.photonics.2020.100865 [Baidu Scholar]
Li Z, Huang J, Zhao Z, et al. Single-layer graphene optical modulator based on arrayed hybrid plasmonic nanowires [J]. Optics Express, 2021, 29(19):30104-13. 10.1364/oe.434916 [Baidu Scholar]
Hao R, Du W, Chen H, et al. Ultra-compact optical modulator by graphene induced electro-refraction effect [J]. Applied Physics Letters, 2013, 103(6):061116. 10.1063/1.4818457 [Baidu Scholar]
Zhou F, Hao R, Jin X-F, et al. A graphene-enhanced fiber-optic phase modulator with large linear dynamic range [J]. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 2014, 26(18):1867-70. 10.1109/lpt.2014.2336660 [Baidu Scholar]
Rezaei M H, Shiri M. High-performance tunable resonant electro-optical modulator based on suspended graphene waveguides [J]. Optics Express, 2021, 29(11):16299-311. 10.1364/oe.425599 [Baidu Scholar]
Wang J, Qiu H, Wei Z, et al. Design of a graphene-based waveguide-integrated multimode phase modulator [J]. IEEE Photonics Journal, 2021, 13(4):1-6. 10.1109/jphot.2021.3089602 [Baidu Scholar]
Wang J, Zhang X, Chen Y, et al. Design of a graphene-based silicon nitride multimode waveguide-integrated electro-optic modulator [J]. Optics Communications, 2021, 481:126531. 10.1016/j.optcom.2020.126531 [Baidu Scholar]