Electro-Evanescent
Technology
The technical solution developed by Vescent Photonics is to utilize liquid crystals, the material with the largest known electro-optic coefficient, in a waveguide architecture that mitigates traditional LC drawbacks. We place the liquid crystal in the cladding of an
otherwise air clad waveguide. By voltage tuning the
index of the LC upper cladding we can voltage
tune the effective index of the guided modes.
We call this the
electro-evanescent
effect.
Advantages to the Electro-Evanescent
Architecture:
1) The light preferentially
interacts with the LC
surface layer, which provides
faster response and lower
scattering losses.
2) The interaction length is
completely decoupled
from the thickness of the
LC cell.
3) The light never
passes
through a
conductive
electrode.