Liquid Crystal Offers Flexible Laser

A new liquid crystal laser offers avenues to new applications, suggest scientists at Osaka University in Suita, Japan. They reported the device in the Nov. 11 issue of Applied Physics Letters.

To fabricate the laser, they injected a mixture of two right-handed photopolymerizable cholesteric liquid crystals, which they doped with DCM dye, between two glass plates that were treated for liquid crystal alignment. A xenon lamp cured the mixture, and the plates were removed. A Q-switched Nd:YAG excited the resulting film with 532-nm light. The film, which displays a pump threshold of 3 µJ per pulse, can be bent to focus the approximately 600-nm output.