Prof. Dr. Igor Muševič (FMF, IJS): How to control light by light in micro-confined liquid crystals?

The softness of liquid crystals, their anisotropic material properties, their strong response to external fields and their ability to align on patterned surfaces, makes them unsurpassable for a number of photonic applications, such as flat-panel displays, light modulators, tuneable filters, entangled photon light sources, lasers, and many others. However, the microscale integration of liquid crystals into micro-photonic devices that not only perform like silicon photonic chips, but use less energy, operate exclusively on light, are biocompatible and can self-assemble, has not been explored. We demonstrate a soft-matter photonic chip that integrates tuneable liquid-crystal micro-lasers and laser micro-printed polymer waveguides. We demonstrate the control of the liquid crystal's micro-laser emission by nanosecond optical pulses and introduce the concept of resonant stimulated-emission depletion to switch the light by light. This opens a new way to design an entirely new class of photonic integrated devices that can be made both biodegradable and biocompatible with a rich variety of applications in medicine, wearable photonics, and logic circuits. We anticipate that soft-matter photonic circuits would not only outperform solid-state photonics in terms of a huge reduction in the number of production steps, the use of non-toxic chemicals and a better energy efficiency, but could open an avenue to the paradigm of soft-matter photonics.
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