Design of on-chip polarizers based on graphene-on-silicon nanowires

Graphene-on-silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have attracted tremendous attention in the areas of optical interconnects, optical communication, and nonlinear optics. As a key component in PICs, various graphene-based polarizers have been studied in the past few years. However, previous works may suffer from fabrication difficulties or high insertion optical losses. Here, we design on-chip polarizers based on graphene-on-silicon nanowires. Specifically, we simultaneously obtain a polarization extinction ratio of 20.1 dB and low optical loss of 0.68 dB for the transverse-electric mode via a 150-μm-long nanowire. We expect our study could pave the way for the development of on-chip graphene-based polarizers and their applications.