Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) rib waveguides with Liquid Crystal (LC) overlay

In a nematic liquid crystal, the orientation of the director can be switched by applying an electric field. In the past, liquid crystals have been combined with glass fibres, pho-tonic crystals and SOI waveguides. The ap-peal of SOI waveguides is due to the fact that they are fabricated using the same pro-cesses as those of complementary metal ox-ide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Their most distinctive feature is high index contrast which results in tight optical con-finement. SOI waveguides combined with liquid crystal could lead to tunable integrat-ed optical devices. In this work, we consider an SOI wave