Plasmonic Modulators Break Wireless Terahertz Barrier

Modern telecommunications infrastructure relies on a broad range of technologies. But ironically, some of these technologies can’t readily communicate with each other. The electrical signals used for wireless communications, for example, can’t just be shoved into the fiber-optic infrastructure that forms the backbone of modern networks. Instead, they must be first converted to light (and then back again). This important task is performed by a network component called an electro-optic (EO) modulator. “All information that you have is in the electrical world, but once it leaves your house, it goes into fiber. So, you need components that can encode from the electrical to the optical world signals at enormous speed. That’s where the modulator comes in,” says Juerg Leuthold, the head of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich. Telecommunications providers hope that next-generation 6G networks ... Read full article.