  The field effect in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors plays a key
role in field-effect transistors (FETs), which are the fundamental building
blocks of modern digital integrated circuits. Recent works show that the field
effect can also be used to make optical/plasmonic modulators. In this paper, we
report field effect electro-absorption modulators (FEOMs) each made of an
ultrathin epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) film, as the active material, sandwiched in a
silicon or plasmonic waveguide. Without a bias, the ENZ film maximizes the
attenuation of the waveguides and the modulators work at the OFF state;
contrariwise, depletion of the carriers in the ENZ film greatly reduces the
attenuation and the modulators work at the ON state. The double capacitor
gating scheme is used to enhance the modulation by the field effect. According
to our simulation, extinction ratio up to 3.44 dB can be achieved in a 500-nm
long Si waveguide with insertion loss only 0.71 dB (85.0%); extinction ratio up
to 7.86 dB can be achieved in a 200-nm long plasmonic waveguide with insertion
loss 1.11 dB (77.5%). The proposed modulators may find important applications
in future on-chip or chip-to-chip optical interconnection.
