Abstract

The quests for higher integration levels and capacity require a “Moore’s Law” development for optical information technology, which in turn drives the efforts to reduce energy requirements for operations such as modulating and switching. Natural materials, however, suffers from limited change of optical index of refraction, thus limiting the size and power consumption of current optical components. In contrast, it was shown that novel designs of fishnet optical metamaterials could offer a modulation of the effective refractive index by as much as 40%, therefore promising a new generation of compact, high speed and low power optical modulators.

© 2010 Optical Society of America