Abstract
Electrically modulated metasurfaces manipulate light fields but suffer from high operating voltages, low tuning sensitivity, and a reliance on telecommunication bands, limiting their applications in light communication (LC). Here, we demonstrate electrically modulated plasmonic metasurfaces that enable continuous and reversible wavelength modulation with a tuning sensitivity up to ~ 1 nm/V at a CMOS-compatible voltage below 5 V. These metasurfaces consist of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) immersed metal nanoparticle lattices and Au electrodes on transparent conductive oxide (TCO)/quartz substrate. Through simulations and experiments, we reveal that the wavelength shift is synergistically governed by the refractive index variation of the DMSO superstrate and the Seebeck effect of the TCO layer, which is further amplified by the lattice mode. Further, we propose two LC applications of these tunable metasurfaces: single-mode spectral shifting for image information transmission and multimode spectral shifts for a 1×3 encoder. The device paves the way for applying metasurfaces in optical communication and optoelectronic circuits.
Data availability
The data supporting the findings of this study are included in the main text, the Supplementary Information, and the Source Data files provided with this paper. Additional data are available from the corresponding author upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under No. 62275257 (S.D.), No. 62474181 (Y.W.), and No. 52276078 (B.W.). We gratefully thank the support from the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Space Application System of China Manned Space Program (F.M.).
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X.W. and S.D. conceived the ideas and designed the investigation. X.W. designed and prepared samples, carried out characterization, performed simulations, and analyzed data. H.Y. participated in the electrical measurements. H.Y., Y.W., K.Z., and X.W. participated in the theoretical analysis. E.G., P.Z., and B.W. contributed to the optical and temperature simulations. S.C. and F.M. contributed to the preparation of ITGZO. J.T. participated in the sample fabrication. Q.J. contributed to the setup of the optical measurement. X.W. and S.D. wrote the paper. All authors commented on and revised the manuscript.
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Wen, X., Yu, H., Wu, Y. et al. Electrically modulated plasmonic metasurfaces for light communication. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71092-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71092-w
