Biomimetic Optics of Photonic Liquid Crystals

Tsung-Hsien Lin^1*

¹Department of Photonics, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

* Presenter:Tsung-Hsien Lin, email:jameslin@mail.nsysu.edu.tw

There are many natural color from photonic crystal structures, such as the wings of the Teinopalpus imperialis butterfly. In this presentation, I will talk about our recent works in artificial liquid crystals based photonic crystals. Two main topics will be focused. One is the crystal study of 3D photonic blue phase liquid crystal, another is the display development of cholesteric liquid crystals. Blue phase (BP) liquid crystals (LC) are soft 3D photonic crystals with extraordinary tunability, electro-optic properties, as well as optical nonlinearities. Recently, we have succeeded in developing a gradient temperature scanning technique to grow such 3D photonic crystals into mm2–cm2 in areal size and submillimeter in thickness. Besides, we propose a method to fabricate non-cubic BPLCs with high stability in the absence of an applied field. Besides, the development of 1D photonic crystal-cholesteric LC display will also be reported.

Keywords: liquid crystal, photonic crystal, display