Title

Tunable Photonic Devices Based On The Temperature Dependent Photonic Band Gap In Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals

Abstract

We have investigated the physical and optical properties of the left-handed chiral dopant ZLI-811 mixed in a nematic liquid crystal (LC) host BL006. The solubility of ZLI-811 in BL006 at room temperature is ∼24 wt%, but can be enhanced by increasing the temperature. Consequently, the photonic band gap of the cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) mixed with more than 24 wt% chiral dopant ZLI-811 is blue shifted as the temperature increases. Based on this property, we demonstrate its applications in thermally tunable band-pass filters and dye-doped CLC lasers. In addition, we also demonstrated a spatially tunable laser emission by generating a one-dimensional temperature gradient along the dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cell. The lasing wavelength is widely tunable from 577 nm to 670 nm. The lowest excitation energy and maximum lasing efficiency occur at λ∼605 nm which corresponds to the peak fluorescence emission of the dye.

Publication Date

11-30-2006

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Volume

6332

Number of Pages

-

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1117/12.678056

Socpus ID

33751383468 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/33751383468

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