An optimal design of a slot waveguide is presented for realizing an ultrafast optical modulator based on a 220 nm silicon wafer technology. The recipe is to maximize the confinement and interaction between optical power supported by the waveguide and electric field applied through metallic electrodes. As height of waveguide is fixed at 220 nm, the waveguide and slot width are optimized to maximize the confinement factor of optical power. Moreover, metal electrodes tend to make the waveguide lossy, their optimal placement is calculated to reduce the optical loss and enhance the voltage per unit width in the slot. Performance of an optimally designed slot waveguide with metal electrodes as ultrafast modulator is also discussed.

In this work, an electrically tunable long-period fiber grating (LPFG) coated with liquid crystal layer (LC) is presented. As a LC layer, a prototype low-birefringence 1550A LC mixture was chosen. As a LPFG host, two types of gratings were studied: the LPFGs based on a standard telecommunication fiber, produced by an electric arc technique with a period of 222 μm, and the LPFGs based on a boron co-doped fiber written by a UV technique with a period of 226.8 μm. The relatively short period of these gratings allowed exploiting unique sensing properties of the attenuation bands associated with modes close to the turn-around point. Experiments carried out showed that for the UV-induced LPFG with a LC layer, on the powered state the attenuation band could be offset from the attenuation band measured in the unpowered state by almost 130 nm. When the arc-induced LPFG was coated with the LC, the depth of the attenuation band could be efficiently controlled by applying an external E-field. Additionally, all experimental results obtained in this work were supported by the theoretical analysis based on a model developed with Optigrating v.4.2 software.