Liquid crystal infiltration of complex dielectrics

Ultrafast optical switching of photonic crystals

“…The ordering and alignment of birefringent materials such as liquid crystals can be controlled by temperature [82,83] or electric fields [84][85][86]. With liquid crystals, large refractive index variations up to 10% are feasible.…”

InP-based two-dimensional photonic crystals filled with polymers

“…Since the first proposal of Busch and John, 2 several tuning experiments have been performed with threedimensional ͑see Ref. 3 for an overview͒ and 2D LCinfiltrated photonic crystals. [4][5][6][7][8][9][10] LC tuning is inherently slow, typically in the order of milliseconds, down to microseconds for certain ferroelectric or polymer-dispersed LCs.…”

Liquid Crystals into Planar Photonic Crystals

“…Among the numerous techniques that have been proposed, infiltrating the air pores of a PhC with a synthetic organic material that has a tunable refractive index (e.g. liquid crystals, polymers, liquids, and liquid dispersions of colloidal quantum dots) has proved to be one of the most promising approaches for both trimming and tuning (Busch & John, 1999;Yoshino et al, 1999b;Leonard et al, 2000;Kubo et al, 2002;Gottardo et al, 2003;Mertens et al, 2003;Schuller et al, 2003;Maune et al, 2004;Mingaleev et al, 2004;Weiss et al, 2005a;Erickson et al, 2006;Ferrini et al, 2006;Haurylau et al, 2006a-b;Intonti et al, 2006;Martz et al, 2006;Tomljenovic-Hanic et al, 2006;van der Heijden et al, 2006a;Barthelemy et al, 2007;Smith et al, 2007;Tay et al, 2007). The effect of infiltrating a PhC with a low refractive index material is qualitatively shown in Fig.…”

“…In particular, the potential of PhC infiltration with nematic liquid crystals (LCs) has been largely demonstrated for one-, two-and three-dimensional (1D, 2D and 3D) PhCs. Therefore, besides their classical fields of application, LCs are also having a strong impact in the PhC field (Busch & John, 1999;Yoshino et al, 1999b;Leonard et al, 2000;Kang et al, 2001;Shimoda et al, 2001;Kubo et al, 2002;Mertens et al, 2002;Gottardo et al, 2003;Mertens et al, 2003;Schuller et al, 2003;Weiss & Fauchet, 2003;Busch et al, 2004;Du et al, 2004;Kubo et al, 2004;Martz et al, 2004;Maune et al, 2004;Kosmidou et al, 2005;Lourtioz et al, 2005;Maune et al, 2005;Weiss et al, 2005a-b;Ferrini et al, 2006;Haurylau et al, 2006b;.…”