Characterisation of a polymeric electro-optic phase modulator for sensing applications

Abstract

Electro-optic (EO) modulator is a device used primarily in optical communication systems to provide an external optical high-speed bandwidth modulation. Instead, the EO modulator can also be employed as sensing instrument with some modification. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance study of a polymer EO phase modulator compared with the commonly used waveguide material LiNbO3 to obtain better low insertion loss and length extension. Both parameters are substantial for biosensing applications such as biomedical equipment to detect human body response.