Lucent Technologies Inc.

Mark Lee

Douglas Max Gill

Howard Edan Katz

Christoph Georg Erben

Aref Chowdhury

Loren Neil Pfeiffer

Kenneth William West

The present invention is an improved electro-optical device comprising a substrate-supported layer of electro-optical material disposed between upper and lower electrodes. Conventional practice has been to make the electrodes thick to minimize electrical loss. Applicants, in contrast, have discovered that the performance of the device can be improved by making the electrodes thin&#x2014;typically about 2 microns or less and preferably about 0.5 micron or less. While the thin electrodes take a relatively large loss penalty at low frequencies, at higher frequencies the thin electrodes provide a relatively low loss, thus producing a flattened frequency response as compared with thick electrode devices. The device can maintain a wide operating bandwidth at frequencies of interest for optical transmission while reducing the required drive voltage.

Electro-optic devices having flattened frequency response with reduced drive voltage

A method includes transmitting a sequence of wavefronts of the optical carrier wave having a first wavelength to an optical waveguide and transmitting a control wave having a second wavelength to a control waveguide. The control wave electro-optically modulates velocities of the wavefronts in the optical waveguide. A dielectric cladding adjacent the optical waveguide has a refractive index at the second wavelength that is larger than the refractive index in the optical waveguide at the first wavelength.

Electro-optical modulators

An electro-optical modulator includes an optical waveguide for carrying an optical carrier wave and a control waveguide for carrying a control wave. The optical waveguide includes a cladding layer and a core. The two waveguides are collinear and overlap in an interaction region so that the refractive index of the optical waveguide responds to electric fields generated by the control wave in the interaction region. The refractive index of the cladding layer at the control wave's wavelength is higher than the refractive index of the core at the optical carrier wave's wavelength.

A hot-electron bolometric mixer/detector, which uses the nonlinearities of the heated two-dimensional electron gas medium, is described. Electrons in the illustrative embodiment of the present invention are &ldquo;velocity-cooled&rdquo; rather than &ldquo;diffusion-cooled&rdquo; or &ldquo;phonon-cooled&rdquo; like hot-electron bolometric mixer/detectors in the prior art. The illustrative embodiment is velocity-cooled when the elastic mean-free path of the electrons is greater than the channel length, L, of the mixer/detector. In this case, the motion of the hot electrons is more accurately modeled by their speed rather than in accordance with diffusion models. This leads to a mixer/detector with a wider modulation bandwidth at a lower power than is exhibited by mixer/detectors in the prior art.

Growing community of inventors

Berkeley Heights, NJ, United States of America

Mark Lee