Dynamic light manipulation via silicon-organic slot metasurfaces

Abstract

Active metasurfaces provide the opportunity for fast spatio-temporal control of light. Among various tuning methods, organic electro-optic materials provide some unique advantages due to their fast speed and large nonlinearity, along with the possibility of using fabrication techniques based on infiltration. In this letter, we report a silicon-organic platform where organic electro-optic material is infiltrated into the narrow gaps of slot-mode metasurfaces with high quality factors. The mode confinement into the slot enables the placement of metallic electrodes in close proximity, thus enabling tunability at lower voltages. We demonstrate the maximum tuning sensitivity of 0.16nm/V, the maximum extinction ratio of 38% within +/- 17V voltage at telecommunication wavelength. The device has 3dB bandwidth of 3MHz. These results provide a path towards tunable silicon-organic hybrid metasurfaces at CMOS-level voltages. In this work, the authors present an active optical metasurface based on a silicon-organic platform. The metasurface can modulate the amplitude of a reflected beam via electric voltage actuation lower than +/- 17V.