Optical Circular-Polarization Modulator Employing Tilt-Poled Electrooptic Polymers

A polymer-based integrated circular-polarization modulator (CPM) is demonstrated in this paper. Tilted poling is adopted to achieve polarization conversion in the electrooptic (EO) polymeric waveguide and then realize the power balance between transverse electric and transverse magnetic modes. Detailed analysis and experiments on polarization conversion are presented. The tensor nature of poled polymeric materials is used to generate the phase difference. Contact poling is applied to perform tilted poling and activate the EO effect of polymeric materials. With appropriate voltage control, the polarization state of the output from the CPM can alternate between the left and right-hand-circular states. The extinction ratios at the 45/spl deg/- and -45/spl deg/-tilted linearly polarized states are larger than 25 dB.