Integrating electronics and photonics is critically important for the realization of high-density and high-speed optoelectronic circuits. However, it remains challenging to achieve this target due to the difficulty of merging many different areas of science and technology. Recently, Professor DONG Huanli from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor HU Wenping from Tianjin University and co-workers design a new organic integrated optoelectronic device, namely, organic field-effect optical waveguide (OFEW), which realizes the integration of field-effect transistor and optical waveguide together. To demonstrate the concept of OFEWs, an organic semiconductor, 2,8-dichloro-5,11-dihexylindolo(3,2-b)carbazole (CHICZ) is used as a model system that can be extended to more complicated fully conjugated systems. The results demonstrate that in such device, the propagation of optical waveguide in the active organic semiconductor can be tuned by the third terminal-the gate electrode of transistor, giving a controllable modulation depth as high as 70% and 50% in parallel and perpendicular directions of charge transport versus optical waveguide, respectively. Also, the optical waveguide with different directions can turn the field-effect of the device with the photodependence ratio up to 14800. This is the first report of OFEW, which would motivate great interests of scientists from organic optoelectronics and expand opportunities for creating scalable integration of electronics and photonics in a chip.
Their work entitled “Organic field-effect optical waveguides” has been published in Nat. Commun. 2018, 9, 4970, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07269-9.