Dynamically programmable surfaces for high-speed optical modulation and detection

Abstract

Dynamically programmable surfaces for spatiotemporal control of light are crucial to many optoelectronic technologies including high-speed optical communication, display and projection, autonomous driving, optical information processing, imaging, and fast programmable optical tweezers. Currently available electro-optically tunable components are often bulky, inefficient, and have limited operation speeds. This thesis describes the development of a compact, high-speed, electro-optic spatial light modulator (SLM) architecture based on two-dimensional arrays of tunable microcavities. Optimized microcavity designs can enable high-speed, high diffraction efficiency SLMs with standard-CMOS-compatible driving voltages. An electro-optic material, graphene, is also investigated in detail. A graphene carrier density spatiotemporal modulation technique is proposed and experimentally validated. This technique enables the demonstration of a compact graphene thermopile in the mid-infrared wavelengths and paves the way for future implementations of graphene plasmonic metasurfaces.