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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An electro-optic (EO) modulator using a TiO 2 slot hybrid waveguide has been designed and fabricated. Optical mode calculations revealed that the mode was primarily confined within the slots when using a double-slot configuration, thus achieving a high EO activity experimentally. The TiO 2 slots also acted as an important barrier to induce an enhanced DC field during the poling of the EO polymer and the driving of the EO modulator. The hybrid phase modulator exhibited a driving voltage ( V π ) of 1.6 V at 1550 nm, which can be further reduced to 0.8 V in a 1 cm-long push-pull Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) structure. The modulator demonstrated a low propagation loss of 5 dB/cm and a relatively high end-fire coupling efficiency.

To reduce the ever-increasing energy consumption in datacenters, one of the effective approaches is to increase the ambient temperature, thus lowering the energy consumed in the cooling systems. However, this entails more stringent requirements for the reliability and durability of the optoelectronic components. Herein, we fabricate and demonstrate silicon-polymer hybrid modulators which support ultra-fast single-lane data rates up to 200 gigabits per second, and meanwhile feature excellent reliability with an exceptional signal fidelity retained at extremely-high ambient temperatures up to 110 °C and even after long-term exposure to high temperatures. This is achieved by taking advantage of the high electro-optic (EO) activities (in-device n 3 r 33  = 1021 pm V −1 ), low dielectric constant, low propagation loss ( α , 0.22 dB mm −1 ), and ultra-high glass transition temperature ( T g , 172 °C) of the developed side-chain EO polymers. The presented modulator simultaneously fulfils the requirements of bandwidth, EO efficiency, and thermal stability for EO modulators. It could provide ultra-fast and reliable interconnects for energy-hungry and harsh-environment applications such as datacentres, 5G/B5G, autonomous driving, and aviation systems, effectively addressing the energy consumption issue for the next-generation optical communication. Information and communication datacentres require a large amount of energy for their cooling systems, which could be decreased by working at higher temperatures. Here, the authors introduce a silicon-polymer hybrid modulator that maintains high data rates for long periods at high temperatures that could be used under such conditions, to reduce energy consumption.

Although molecular rectifiers were proposed over four decades ago1,2, until recently reported rectification ratios (RR) were rather moderate2–11 (RR ~ 101). This ceiling was convincingly broken using a eutectic GaIn top contact12 to probe molecular monolayers of coupled ferrocene groups (RR ~ 105), as well as using scanning tunnelling microscopy-break junctions13–16 and mechanically controlled break junctions17 to probe single molecules (RR ~ 102–103). Here, we demonstrate a device based on a molecular monolayer in which the RR can be switched by more than three orders of magnitude (between RR ~ 100 and RR ≥ 103) in response to humidity. As the relative humidity is toggled between 5% and 60%, the current–voltage (I–V) characteristics of a monolayer of di-nuclear Ru-complex molecules reversibly change from symmetric to strongly asymmetric (diode-like). Key to this behaviour is the presence of two localized molecular orbitals in series, which are nearly degenerate in dry circumstances but become misaligned under high humidity conditions, due to the displacement of counter ions (PF6–). This asymmetric gating of the two relevant localized molecular orbital levels results in humidity-controlled diode-like behaviour.