Novel All-Optical Liquid Photonic Crystal Router

A novel design of an easily and fully integrated terabit per second (Tbit/s) optical router is presented and analyzed using the finite difference time domain method. The proposed router consists of three photonic bandgap (PBG) waveguides with two nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layers. The suggested device can be used to divert the light beam to one of the three photonic crystal waveguides based on the biasing states of the two NLC layers. In this way, there are three different modes of operation where each one is used for routing data to the required direction. The suggested device offers crosstalk of 19 dB. In addition, the reported structure opens up the revenue for building multi-port optical routers through the use of a number of appropriately positioned NLC layers within the platform of PBG structure.

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