Dynamically programmable surfaces for high-speed optical modulation and detection

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Peng, Cheng, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dirk R. Englund.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132983

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/132983