Applied Materials Today
Optical-intensity modulator with InSb nanosheets
Graphical abstract
Introduction
As an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary subject, optical-intensity modulators have attracted increasing attention in past decades [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. It plays a key role in photonics and optoelectronics applications, such as photon control, environmental monitoring, pulsed lasers and optical interconnect [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. Using nonlinear optical effect of transmission medium is an important means to realize optical-intensity modulation [1,[15], [16], [17]–18]. Nonlinear optics describes the interaction of light and transmission medium [19] .This interaction is usually very weak, but it will become strong with the increase of light energy [20,21], which will lead to saturable absorption effect [[22], [23], [24]–25]. The crux of achieving effective nonlinear effect is to find a suitable nonlinear material.
Over the past few decades, saturable absorbers (SAs) as important methods for optical modulation have been developed rapidly as shown in Fig. 1(a) [53]. Initially, Dyes/colored glasses as the first SA was applied to solid-state laser. Afterwards, semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) was widely used in pulsed lasers [46,47]. However, the SESAM also has some disadvantages, such as low damaged threshold, complicated fabrication process and narrow operating band [53,58]. In recent years, the emerging nanostructured low-dimensional materials, such as transition metal disulfides (e.g. SnS2, WS2, ReS2), graphene, black phosphorus, plasmonic metal, have exhibited excellent optical-intensity modulation capability on account of high electron mobility, transient photo-bleaching and high robustness against laser damage [[26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]–33,49]. However, the preparation methods or optical-intensity modulation capabilities of this materials are not very mature at present. III-V compounds (e.g. GaSb, InN) have attracted increasing attention in the field of optical-intensity modulation due to their excellent electrical and optical properties, such as high electron mobility, surface sensitivity and quantum local effect in relatively large size [34,35]. InSb, as a binary compound material with the narrowest band gap (~ 0.18 eV) in the III-V semiconductor materials, has been widely used in infrared detection, optoelectronic components, transistor structure devices and reluctance components.
InSb‘s electron effective mass is 0.0135 m02, the electron mobility is 7.8 × 104 cm2v−1s−1. So it also can be considered as a good candidate for thermoelectric materials. Though most of the researches are focused on InSb bulk materials, there are increasing reports on low-dimensional InSb in recent years. For example, Moiseev et al. have found that the InSb Quantum Dots can be grown by liquid phase epitaxy [36]. Park et al. proposed that the high-quality InSb nanowires can be prepared by high-densities InSb substrates [37]. Dick et al. have studied the effect of growth parameters (e.g. temperature, precursor molar fraction) on the InSb nanowire crystal structure [38]. Sebastien Plissard et al. have proved that InSb nanowire devices can induce superconductivity and have high carrier mobility [39]. Thelander et al. have pointed that the electrical properties of InSb nanowires is related to axial and radial composition [40]. Yang et al. have found that the band gap of InSb nanowire will increase with decreasing the diameter.
At the same time, Sb group binary compounds generally have very small band gap as shown in Fig 1 (b), which mean they are also suitable for infrared applications. Among them, Sb2Te3 has been proved to have excellent optical-intensity modulation capability in many wave bands [42,43]. But most Sb group binary compounds have not been explored. Therefore, the systematic and comprehensive research on representative InSb is necessary.
In this work, the InSb nanosheets are prepared by chemical vapor transport (CVT) method and liquid-phase exfoliation method. Then, the micro structure, crystalline phase purity, crystallinity and elemental composition of synthesized samples were observed. Those results have indicated that this samples have excellent quality. Meanwhile, the modulation depth and saturation intensity of InSb nanosheets are 1.5% and 72.8 MW/cm2. At last, we achieved switchable dual-wavelength mode locking at the center wavelength of 1561 nm and 1566.2nm, respectively. These results show that InSb nanosheets can be prepared by a simple method. Furthermore, it has great potential in the field of optical modulator, which has been proved by experiments.
Section snippets
Experimental results and discussion
Fig. 2 (a) and (b) are the chemical structure diagram of InSb. The layers of InSb are connected by covalent bond, which mean InSb can't easily be separated into complete single layers. The whole preparation processes of InSb nanosheets are shown in Fig. 2 (c) and (d). Firstly, the bulk InSb was synthesized by CVT method. Then, the InSb nanosheets were prepared by liquid-phase exfoliation, which are using anhydrous ethanol as solvent. Finally, the pure InSb nanosheets dispersions were obtained
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have prepared InSb nanosheets by using CVT method and liquid-phase exfoliation method. The saturation intensity and modulation depth of saturable absorber device based on InSb nanosheets are 1.5% and 72.8 MW/cm2, respectively. Then, we have achieved switchable dual-wavelength mode locking by using an optical modulator based on InSb nanosheets. The pulse duration time and the repetition rate of are 1.12 ps and 5.9 MHz, respectively. As far as we know, this is the first time
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Ya-min Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Ya-xin Chen: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation. Xiao-hui Li: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Shuyuan Lv: Conceptualization, Methodology,
Declaration of Competing Interest
We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work, there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled " Optical-intensity modulator with few-layer InSb nanosheets".
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61605106); Funded projects for the Acedemic Leader and Acedemic Backbones, Shaanxi Normal University (18QNGG006); Projects of International Cooperation and Exchanges in Shaanxi (2020KW-005); Starting Grants of Shaanxi Normal University (grant numbers 1112010209 and 1110010717); Fundamental Research Funds For the Central Universities (GK201802006); Open Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and
Data availability
We are sure that every reference cited in the text is present in the reference list. And these references have been published. Meanwhile, we ensure that data provided in the references are correct and effective.
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