Liquid crystal tunable claddings for polymer integrated optical waveguides

Tunable electronic lens using a gradient polymer network liquid crystal

Tunable electronic lenses using gradient polymer network liquid crystal ~PNLC! cells were demonstrated. By changing the photomask pattern, both positive and negative lenses were fabricated. The advantages of such a PNLC lens are low operation voltage, large aperture size, and simple electrode design. To overcome the polarization dependence, stacking two orthogonal homogeneous PNLC cells is cons...

Asymmetric tunable Fabry-Perot cavity using switchable polymer stabilized cholesteric liquid crystal optical Bragg mirror

Optical properties of an asymmetric Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity interferometer made up of a conventional metallic mirror and a polymer stabilized cholesteric liquid crystal (PSCLC) Bragg mirror have been investigated. The first FP cavity design comprises a gold mirror, an iso-tropic layer made up of the polymer glue, a quarter wave plate to convert the input linearly polarized modes into the circul...

Electrically tunable wettability of liquid crystal/polymer composite films.

An electrically tunable wettability in a liquid crystal/ polymer composite film is demonstrated, in which liquid crystal molecules are anchored among polymer grains. The tunable wettability of the composite films originates from the reorientation of the anchored liquid-crystal molecules, which is switched by an in-plane electric field with squared pulses of voltages. These liquid crystal/polyme...

Optical tuning of silicon photonic structures with nematic liquid crystal claddings.

An analysis of and experimental demonstration of active optical tuning of silicon strip waveguides with methyl red doped nematic liquid crystal claddings is presented. Under low-power irradiation by polarized light, the reorientation of the nematic, the resulting index change, and phase shift produce a tuning range of 5.6 nm for the microresonator resonances.

Finite element optical modeling of liquid crystal waveguides