Optical multimode interference router in sol-gel waveguide with a liquid crystal cladding

The self-imaging principle has been applied in the design of a novel configuration for an electro-optical router, working at the wavelength of 1.55 micron The device is composed by: a single mode input optical channel waveguide; a bimodal active region, having a liquid crystal as over-layer, an output Y branch, to separate the two output channels. The active region is designed to allow a pi shift between the two modes that it supports, by means of electro-optic effect of smectic A*, in order to steer light from one output channel to the other one. In this paper, for the first time, the performances of an electro-optical router, based on the multimode interference effects together with the electro-optic effect of smectic A* liquid crystal, are theoretically and numerically discussed.