The tight confinement of optical modes afforded by nanophotonic devices can enable extraordinary electro-optic switching performance in silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) device architectures. Recent records in POH devices include bandwidths &gt; 500 GHz and energy efficiency &lt; 100 aJ/bit. However, nanoscale metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguides containing amorphous organic materials as the core layer suffer from reduced performance at &lt; 100 nm waveguide widths due to strong interactions between the metal surface and strongly polar organic electro-optic chromophores. Utilization of bulk and/or isotropic models can lead to overly optimistic translation of materials performance to device performance. We address the challenge of predicting and improving performance of organic materials in hybrid photonic devices with a combination of multi-scale modeling techniques and statistical mechanics to demonstrate the factors leading to reduced performance and exploring a variety of methods for mitigating chromophore-metal interactions.

Modeling surface effects on hybrid organic nanophotonic performance

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.