Ultra-Efficient Supramolecular Organic Electro-Optic Materials for Hybrid Graphene Organic Platform

Description

Organic electro-optic (OEO) materials offer the key function of high electro-optic bandwidth and low cost processing, and are of intense research interests for hybrid integration with silicon photonic, plasmonic, conductive oxides, and dielectric photonic platforms. This hybrid material approach can ultimately achieve substantial energy saving, bandwidth enhancement, miniaturization and chip-scale integration of nanophotonic/nanoelectronic systems to their full potential for future information technology. In recent years, graphene has generated considerable research interest as an exceptional optoelectronic material. In particular, graphenehas been demonstrated as a low loss 2D electrode material in optical waveguides at the C+L wavelength bands for fiber-optic communication, opening the possibility of using graphene as a broad-band transparent conductor for the design and fabrication of electro-optic (EO) waveguides.This project will exploit the full potential of recent major research progress in synthetic chemistry of multicomponent reactions and multiscale theoretical/experimental efforts in supramolecular engineering of OEO materials, push their performance limit and explore new hybrid integration with low loss graphene conductors. We plan to use rational molecular design to optimize synthetic chemistry and hyperpolarizability of chromophores, and use supramolecular engineering to enhance the effective loading density and control the meso- and nanoscale ordering of OEO materials. These concerted research efforts can lead to the development of high performance supramolecular OEO materials possessing high refractive index (n) of 1.8-2.2 and ultralarge n3r33figure-of-merit (> 3,000 pm/V). We will also develop new technique to transfer CVD graphene onto OEO films, either by using solvent resistant OEO materials that can be separated from commercial polymeric carrier, or developing sequential solution processing protocols enabling etching-free transfer. The graphene layer will be used as a transparent electrode to optimize the poling of OEO films, and enable new processing of pre-poled highly efficient OEO films with effective poled area at the wafer scale, or on flexible substrates. A short term goal of this project is to build hybrid geometry of graphene OEO material modulators as a key solution to the driven-voltage/optical-loss tradeoffin design and fabrication of OEO based waveguides, and achieve ultrahigh EO coefficients (>300 pm/V), low optical loss and efficient waveguide device fabrication.We expect that such graphene organic hybrid (GOH) platform be fed into the major development of photonics integrated circuits of silicon photonics, plasmonics and dielectric photonics, and benefit a broad spectrum of technologies ranged from femtojoule opticalmodulation to ultra-broadband RF and terahertz nonlinear photonics.