By virtue of their constituents’ soft matter attributes and easy susceptibilities to applied fields, liquid crystalline chiral photonic crystals exhibit highly tunable linear and nonlinear optical properties that allow applications throughout a very wide spectrum. In particular, nearly-mm thick 1-D chiral photonic crystals fabricated with cholesteric liquid crystal are shown to be capable of polarization rotation and switching of complex laser vector fields with response times that can be as fast as sub-picoseconds, and operating wavelength ranging from the visible to near- and mid-IR range. [Ref.: Nature Comm. 8, Article number: 727 (2017); PNAS 2021, 118 (16)].
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