Electrooptical Switching in a One-Dimensional Photonic Crystal

Tunable and Memorable Optical Devices with One-Dimensional Photonic-Crystal/Liquid-Crystal Hybrid Structures

“…Ozaki and associates report that increasing the layer number in the multilayer decreases the line width and transmittance of defect-mode peaks because the Bragg-reflected light, dictated by the multilayer, is limited to reach the defect layer (Ozaki et al, 2004a). On the other hand, it is concluded by Zyryanov and coauthors that the number of defect modes is increased with increasing thickness of the defect layer or using the material with high refractive index as a defect layer (Zyryanov et al, 2008).…”

“…Moreover, they experimentally and theoretically demonstrated that the transmission tunability of defect modes can be achieved by placing the cell between crossed polarizers to allow "interference" between two orthogonal polarization components through vector sum in the projection direction along the transmission axis of the analyzer. As a result, the transmittance is increased when the defect-mode wavelength of an extraordinary component overlaps that of an ordinary one (Zyryanov et al, 2008). …”

“…For the 1D PC/LC cells mentioned in Section 1.1, the LC defect layers used are DMLCs acting as phase retarders. The mechanism of the tunable defect modes in these cells can thus be explained in terms of the ordinary and extraordinary refractive indices (Ozaki et al, 2002(Ozaki et al, , 2004bZyryanov et al, 2008). On the other hand, the twisted-nematic (TN) LC, in which the molecular orientation exhibits 90° twist, acts as an optical polarization rotator so that the light passing through the TN LC is characterized by the rotation of polarization.…”

“…After the publication of the milestone paper by Ozaki et al (Ozaki et al, 2002), the idea has been extended to the 1D PC/CLC color-tunable lasing (Matsuhisa et al, 2006(Matsuhisa et al, , 2007Ozaki et al, 2003aOzaki et al, , 2005Park et al, 2009) and fast-response PC/LC structure (Ozaki et al, 2003b). Furthermore, based on this mechanism, several approaches, such as varying the incident angle of light (Arkhipkin et al, 2007) and temperature (Arkhipkin et al, 2008) or using magnetic field (Zyryanov et al, 2008) to adjust the optical anisotropy of LCs, have successively been proposed for realization of tunable 1D PC/LC cells. Particularly, Zyryanov and colleagues further took the investigation of a 1D PC/LC cell to a new stage by setting the hybrid cell between crossed polarizers .…”

“…Their results conclude some attractive features for the tunable mechanism of defect modes within the PBG. First, the shift of defect-mode wavelengths depends on the change in effective refractive index (neff) (Zyryanov et al, 2008. The decrease in neff gives rise to the blueshift of defect-mode wavelengths whereas redshift occurs as neff increases.…”