All-optical modulation with 2D layered materials: status and prospects

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Optical modulation technique plays a crucial role in photonics technologies, and there is an ever-increasing demand for broadband and ultrafast optical modulation in the era of artificial intelligence. All-optical modulation is known to be able to operate in an ultrafast way and has a broadband response, showing great potential in applications for ultrafast information processing and photonic computing. Two-dimensional (2D) materials with exotic optoelectronic properties bring tremendous new opportunities for all-optical modulators with excellent performance, which have attracted lots of attention recently. In this review, we cover the state-of-art all-optical modulation based on 2D materials, including graphene, transitional metal dichalcogenides, phosphorus, and other novel 2D materials. We present the operations mechanism of different types of all-optical modulators with various configurations, such as fiber-integrated and free-space ones. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by all-optical modulation, as well as offer some future perspectives for the development of all-optical modulation based on 2D materials.</jats:p>

Fast, accurate, point-of-care COVID-19 pandemic diagnosis enabled through advanced lab-on-chip optical biosensors: Opportunities and challenges

“…In contrast to waveguide-based sensors that rely on light wave absorption, resonant displacement in functionalized microcavities provides a wide range of ultrasensitive optical biosensors. 68,69 The magnitude of binding is determined by de Feijter's formula, 70 which relates the absolute quantity of adsorbed molecules M with the change in the refractive index as where d A is the thickness of the adsorbed layer, n A is the refractive index of adsorbed molecules, n c is the refractive index of the cover solution, and dn / dt is the change in the refractive index of molecules, which is proportional to the shift dλ in position of the resonance peak. The size of the resonance wavelength shift is proportional to the number of adsorbed biomolecules, thus providing a label-free method to quantitatively determine the target analyte.…”

“…Contrasted to waveguide-based sensors that rely on light wave absorption, resonant displacement in functionalized microcavities provides a wide range of ultra-sensitive optical biosensors 79,80 . The magnitude of binding is determined by De Feijter's formula 81 that relates the absolute quantity of adsorbed molecules M with the change in the refractive index as:…”

Hybrid/Integrated Silicon Photonics Based on 2D Materials in Optical Communication Nanosystems

“…More recently, there have been a renewed interest in achieving optical modulation in Si photonics-2D materials heterostructures, [172,173] since it is a crucial part of on-chip signal processing and other significant applications, such as sensing, environment monitoring and security check. [174] Depending on the operation mechanisms, optical modulators can be divided into all-optical, electro-optic, thermo-optic, and so on, [175] with the important figures of merit to be modulation depth, speed, wavelength range, loss, and power consumption. [176][177][178] In this section, both the electro-optic and thermo-optic modulators are profoundly reviewed.…”

Polarization-tunable nonlinear absorption patterns from saturated absorption to reverse saturated absorption in anisotropic GeS flake and an application of all-optical switching

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are mainly four types of switches [66]: the thermo-optic-based [67,68], the optical-limiting-based [69,70], the plasmonic nanostructure-based [71][72][73][74][75] and the SA-based switches [57]. In this context, we will focus our study on the fourth category.…”