| Date | 3rd, May 2022 |
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More than three decades ago when silicon carbide was found to display the ‘Pockels effect’. It is a polarising technique used in electrical engineering, which was thought to have potential to make electronics smaller and faster.
Now scientists from the University of Sydney and Harvard University found a way to harness that potential of silicon carbide to make a new-generation electro-optic modulator.
Silicon carbide is very hard and very durable, but difficult to work with. Image credit: Beeblaine via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
Back then silicon carbide was described as a photonics wonder material, but available techniques to work with it and actually employ it in electronics were severely limited. However, for decades scientists held onto the belief that silicon carbide could unlock the next generation of system-on-chip components. Researchers now understand that this material could be useful in traditional electronics as well as quantum emitters. In fact, silicon carbide could be very important for the future of quantum computers.
An international collaboration now saw silicon carbide being made into an electro-optic modulator, which is very strong, very compact, and, potentially, very fast. Electro-optic modulators, in simple terms, encode electrical signals into optical ones.
As light travels very fast and very efficiently, these kinds of devices are crucial for the operation of global communication systems and data centres. However, this new silicon carbide electro-optic modulator uses Pockels effect and offers many advantages.
First of all, silicon carbide electro-optic modulators could be relatively cheap to make. This is quite interesting, because for decades silicon carbide was considered very hard to work with, but now scientists seem to have overcome that obstacle. They also exhibit low loss, ultrafast and wide-bandwidth data transmission. Silicon carbide electro-optic modulators could make for very compact transmitters for signal processing, microwave photonics, chip-to-chip, or intra-chip interconnects.
Professor Marko Loncar, lead researcher from Harvard University, said: “The silicon carbide modulator will likely find applications in quantum communications. For example, they could be used to control temporal and spectral properties of quantum emitters that exist in this material, as well as to route the photons in reconfigurable fashion.”
This may seem quite far ahead, but scientists believe that technologies like silicon carbide electro-optic modulators could one day step into our everyday electronics as well. Especially if they are cost-effective and compact as they seem to be now. In a laboratory setting these devices already demonstrated high optical intensities, allowing for high optical signal-to-noise ratios for modern communications in datacenters, 6G and satellites, and future quantum internet.
Source: University of Sydney
