A temperature modulation photonic crystal Mach-Zehnder interferometer composed of copper oxide high-temperature superconductor

Abstract

A tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a two-dimensional photonic crystal structure using copper oxide high-temperature superconductor is proposed. This photonic crystal is composed of rods of which axes are perpendicular to the two-dimensional anisotropic copper oxide plane. By tuning the temperature of the superconductor, the refractive index of the superconductor as well as the photonic band gap can be changed. The photonic band structures of two-dimensional photonic crystals composed of the superconductor are calculated by using the plane-wave expansion method, and interference properties are investigated by using the finite-difference time-domain method. For our designed photonic crystal Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the simulation results show that the light transmission can be modulated from 92.7% to 1.4% with different temperature distributions.