Nature Publication

In a collaborative effort under the lead of ETH, a group of scientist from the ETH-IEF institute, the University of Washington and the Purdue University have introduce a new plasmonic device with the potential to change the chip-scale integration of optics.
The finding reported in the latest Nature release relates to the field optical communications for the Internet. A key element in every Internet link is the modulator - a device that translates electrical information into an optical signal before being fed onto a fiber.  The research team has introduced a tiny modulators that allows to encode information onto an optical laser beam at highest speed with a record low power consumption. The authors demonstrate the encoding of 72 Gbit/s of information with as little as a 0.7 mW of power on a ring-shaped device with a radius of 1 micrometer. This is by far the most compact modulator ever built at such speed. The most interesting part however is the technology. The researchers were relying on plasmonics. The traditional implementation would be based on photonics. So far researchers have avoided plasmonics, as plasmonics is known in all industry as a technology that comes at the price of highest optical losses. Yet – and this is by far the most spectacular finding – a trick has been found to uses plasmonics without suffering from such high losses.

external pagehttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0031-4call_made