TY - JOUR
T1 - Liquid crystals tunable optical metamaterials
AU - Khoo, Iam Choon
AU - Diaz, Andres
AU - Liou, Justin
AU - Stinger, Michael V.
AU - Huang, Junbin
AU - Ma, Yi
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received June 1, 2009; revised July 31, 2009 and August 23, 2009. First published March 1, 2010; current version published April 7, 2010. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center under Grant DMR-0213623, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Army Research Office.
PY - 2010/3
Y1 - 2010/3
N2 - A critical discussion with detailed calculations for the complex refractive indexes of metamaterials of various nanoconstituent makeups, sizes, shapes and concentrations, and periodic nanostructured patterns/geometry are presented. These metamaterials possess tunable subunity, zero, or negative refractive indexes, on account of the large birefringence of their nematic liquid crystal constituent. We also studied the special case involving laser dye-doped nematic liquid crystals that could provide optical gain. It is shown that the resulting metamaterials loss can be minimized, while achieving the desired tunable birefringence. Some preliminary experimental studies have demonstrated fast optically induced modulation of the nematic liquid crystals and indicated the possibility of ultimately realizing fast tunable or nonlinear optical metamaterials.
AB - A critical discussion with detailed calculations for the complex refractive indexes of metamaterials of various nanoconstituent makeups, sizes, shapes and concentrations, and periodic nanostructured patterns/geometry are presented. These metamaterials possess tunable subunity, zero, or negative refractive indexes, on account of the large birefringence of their nematic liquid crystal constituent. We also studied the special case involving laser dye-doped nematic liquid crystals that could provide optical gain. It is shown that the resulting metamaterials loss can be minimized, while achieving the desired tunable birefringence. Some preliminary experimental studies have demonstrated fast optically induced modulation of the nematic liquid crystals and indicated the possibility of ultimately realizing fast tunable or nonlinear optical metamaterials.
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U2 - 10.1109/JSTQE.2009.2032246
DO - 10.1109/JSTQE.2009.2032246
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77950916368
SN - 1077-260X
VL - 16
SP - 410
EP - 417
JO - IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics
JF - IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics
IS - 2
M1 - 5422651
ER -