PAPER Suk-Won Choi et al. Investigation for correlation between elastic constant and thermal stability of liquid crystalline blue phase I

A lasing peak shift of more than 100 nm is realized due to the large shift of a photonic bandgap of a liquid-crystalline blue phase.

A thermodynamically stable blue phase II (BPII) has been prepared, and its electrooptical (EO) performance has been evaluated in a host system of a conventional rodlike nematogen mixed with a bent-core molecule. For the mixed system presented, the widest temperature range of BPII stability, during cooling/heating, was >6 °C. This range is much wider than those of conventional nematogens blended with chiral dopants. EO observations show that the BPII produced exhibited stable EO performance based on the EO Kerr effect. The temperature dependence of the Kerr effect was found to be in approximate agreement with the Landau-de Gennes theory. Furthermore, this material demonstrated very fast, sub-millisecond-scale, response times, thus showing potential for use in high-speed EO devices.

A well-aligned dye-doped blue phase II laser shows tunable emission wavelength and much lower emission threshold energy.