Low voltage electro-optic polymer light modulator using attenuated total internal reflection

An improved electro-optic (EO) polymer light modulator based on attenuated-total-internalreflection (ATR) is demonstrated. The modulator consists of a prism-metal-EO-polymermetal multilayer structure. An applied electric field across the EO polymer layer electrically modulates the energy coupling efficiency of incoming light into guided wave resonance at fixed angles. Compared with conventional ATR modulators based on surface plasmon resonance, the driving voltage for this modulator has been greatly reduced because of the newly chosen working interior angle. It also offers advantages in terms of insertion loss and aperture size over other techniques for the amplitude modulation of a collimated light beam.