Super electro-optic modulation in bulk KTN:Cu based on electric-field-enhanced permittivity

The electric-field-enhanced effect of permittivity can improve the performance of electro-optic modulators and deflectors. A theoretical model of super electro-optic modulation based on the field-enhanced effect of the permittivity was proposed. Results showed that a strong field-enhanced effect can greatly reduce the half-wave voltage and increase the modulation depth as a result of increased relative dielectric permittivity and permittivity gradient to the electric field. For bulk paraelectric KTN:Cu near the Curie temperature, we found a novel phenomenon that the response of relative dielectric permittivity to the bias electric field was closely related to the frequency, including attenuation, invariance, and enhancement. We effectively selected the frequencies corresponding to the strong field-enhanced effect by measuring the dielectric-frequency spectrum under the bias voltage. At these frequencies, a phase retardation of π was achieved through 2V AC modulation voltage, indicating that the half-wave voltage was reduced by one order of magnitude.