{"id":131096,"date":"2021-11-22T19:23:17","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T03:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/new-device-modulates-visible-light-without-dimming-it-with-the-smallest-footprint-and-lowest-power-consumption"},"modified":"2021-11-22T19:23:17","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T03:23:17","slug":"new-device-modulates-visible-light-without-dimming-it-with-the-smallest-footprint-and-lowest-power-consumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/new-device-modulates-visible-light-without-dimming-it-with-the-smallest-footprint-and-lowest-power-consumption","title":{"rendered":"New device modulates visible light \u2014without dimming it \u2014with the smallest footprint and lowest power consumption"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars. This research area, known as integrated photonics, is fast evolving and investigators are now exploring the shorter\u2014visible\u2014wavelength range to develop a broad variety of emerging applications. These include chip-scale LIDAR (light detection and ranging), AR\/VR\/MR (augmented\/virtual\/mixed reality) goggles, holographic displays, quantum information processing chips, and implantable optogenetic probes in the brain.<\/p>\n

The one device critical to all these applications in the visible range<\/a> is an optical phase modulator, which controls the phase of a light wave, similar to how the phase of radio waves is modulated in wireless computer networks. With a phase modulator, researchers can build an on-chip optical switch<\/a> that channels light into different waveguide ports. With a large network of these optical switches, researchers could create sophisticated integrated optical systems that could control light propagating on a tiny chip or light emission from the chip.<\/p>\n

But phase modulators in the visible range are very hard to make: there are no materials that are transparent enough in the visible spectrum while also providing large tunability, either through thermo-optical or electro-optical effects. Currently, the two most suitable materials are silicon nitride and lithium niobate. While both are highly transparent in the visible range, neither one provides very much tunability. Visible-spectrum phase modulators based on these materials are thus not only large but also power-hungry: the length of individual waveguide-based modulators ranges from hundreds of microns to several mm and a single modulator consumes tens of mW for phase tuning. Researchers trying to achieve large-scale integration\u2014embedding thousands of devices on a single microchip\u2014have, up to now, been stymied by these bulky, energy-consuming devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars. This research area, known as integrated photonics, is fast evolving and investigators are now exploring the shorter\u2014visible\u2014wavelength range to develop [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1498,412,418,1617,6,1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-augmented-reality","category-genetics","category-internet","category-quantum-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}