Abstract

The digital optical switch (DOS) is one of the most promising optical switches because of the polarization independence achieved simply by increasing the voltage. To date, to our knowledge, only DOS driven by two symmetric voltages have been described, but from the standpoint of system safety, it is very important to have a switched state obtainable without a voltage (i.e., with zero voltage). The schematic diagram of an usual digital optical switch,^1,2 with one input and two outputs, is depicted in Fig. 1(a). The electrode structure is for X-cut LiNbO₃, and Y propagation. As is explained in Ref. 3, the device works as a mode splitter when the following relation is satisfied:

© 1993 Optical Society of America