In this work, we report InGaAs based photodiodes integrating liquid crystal (LC) microcells resonant microcavity on their surface. The LC microcavities monolithically integrated on the photodiodes act as a wavelength selective filter for the device. Photodetection measurements performed with a tunable laser operating in the telecom S and C bands demonstrated a wavelength sweep for the photodiode from 1480 nm to 1560 nm limited by the tuning range of the laser. This spectral window is covered with a LC driving voltage of 7V only, corresponding to extremely low power consumption. The average sensitivity over the whole spectral range is 0.4 A/W, slightly lower than 0.6 A/W for similar photodiodes that do not integrate such a LC tunable filter. The quality of the filter integrated onto the surfaces of the photodiodes is constant over a large tuning range (70 nm), showing a FWHM of 1.5 nm.
We have investigated the feasibility of optical tunable filters based on a Fabry-Perot etalon that uses a suspension of goethite (α-FeOOH) nanorods as electro-optic material for application in optical telecommunications in the near IR range. These synthetic nanoparticles have a high optical anisotropy that give rise to a very strong Kerr effect in their colloidal suspensions. Currently, these particles are dispersed in aqueous solvent, with pH2 to ensure the colloidal electrostatic stability. However, the high conductivity of these suspensions requires using high-frequency electric fields (f > 1 MHz), which brings about a high power consumption of the driver. To decrease the field frequency, we have changed the solvent to ethylene glycol which has a lower electrical conductivity than the aqueous solvent. We have built a Fabry-Perot cell, filled with this colloidal suspension in the isotropic phase, and showed that a phase shift of 14 nm can be obtained in a field of 3V/μm. Therefore, the device can operate as a tunable filter. A key advantage of this filter is that it is, by principle, completely insensitive to the polarization of the input light. However, several technological issues still need to be solved, such as ionic contamination of the suspension from the blocking layers, and dielectrophoretic and thermal effects.
We investigated the layer dynamics of a conventional surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal (SSFLC) using a full-optical snapshot Mueller matrix polarimeter (SMMP) based on wavelength polarization coding. Time-resolved polarimetric measurements were performed with different SSFLC samples, and a strong correlation between the polarimetric parameters and the SSFLC under electric field at different exposure times was found. It has been shown that the SMMP polarimeter is able to determine the evolution of the trajectory of the liquid crystal director between the two addressed states, the reversible motion of the smectic layer while switching, as well as the irreversible transition from chevron to bookshelf texture.
Optical properties of an asymmetric Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity interferometer made up of a conventional metallic mirror and a polymer stabilized cholesteric liquid crystal (PSCLC) Bragg mirror have been investigated. The first FP cavity design comprises a gold mirror, an isotropic layer made up of the polymer glue, a quarter wave plate to convert the input linearly polarized modes into the circularly polarized modes inside the cavity, and the PSCLC Bragg mirror, all sandwiched between two indium tin oxide glass plates. The second FP cavity has a layer of conducting polymer deposited on the quarter-wave plate to apply the electric field only to the cholesteric stack. To have reflectivity above 95% in visible range we implement 30 layers of cholesteric liquid crystal in a planar Grandjean texture. The device compactness and the mirror parallelism due to the monolithic fabrication of FP are advantageous from the technical point of view. We test the FP tunability by shifting the resonance wavelength through an entire period; by applying electric field and/or by varying the temperature.
We present a new approach to achieve tunability on a 1.55 μm vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL). Tunability is achieved thanks to an electro-optic index modulator. This electro-optic material consists in a n-PDLC phase layer introduced inside the VCSEL cavity. N-PDLC comprises nematic liquid crystal dispersed in a polymer material. This first VCSEL exhibits a 10 nm tuning range and an excellent side-mode suppression ratio higher than 20
dB over the whole spectral range. The device is formed by a conventional InP-based active region with an epitaxial and a dielectric Bragg mirror. The n-PDLC layer length, close to 6 μm, is in agreement with a tunable laser emission without mode-hopping. Another decisive advantage, compared to mechanical solutions, is the tuning response time which is close to a few 10 μs to scan the full spectral range, making this device appropriate for some access network functions. Voltage values are the main limiting factor, 170 Volts have been required to obtain 10 nm tunability, but material
engineering is in progress to improve this point. We presented a first version of the device optically pumped, the next version will be electrically pumped as required for access network applications targeted here.
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