Electro-optic modulators (EOM) are one of the most critical components in an interconnect circuit; improving their performance is essential. The prominent EO effect found in silicon is the plasma dispersion effect. This effect is related to the density of free carriers in a semiconductor and hence the resistive and capacitive components that arise limits the bandwidth of a silicon EOM to a few tens of Gigahertz.

On the other hand, commercially available EOM use non-linear materials that show the linear electro-optic Pockels effect. Barium Titanate (BTO) is a material that has the largest Pockels coefficients. It can also be grown on large wafer-size silicon substrates and with appreciable crystal quality.

My work focuses on using integrated BTO for on-chip electro-optic modulation. We also study the material properties that such a thin film ferroelectric material shows which can potentially affect its electro-optic response, like multiple ferroelectric domain-switching and other thin-film effects like domain pinning.