Self-assembled liquid-crystal microlasers, microresonators, and microfibres

Abstract

When liquid crystals are dispersed in an immiscible fluid, microdroplets of liquid crystal are spontaneously formed in a fraction of a second. They have optically anisotropic internal structure, which is determined by the ordering of liquid crystal molecules at the interface. Spherical droplets of a nematic liquid crystal can function as whispering-gallery-mode microresonators with an unprecedented width of wavelength tunability by an electric field. WGM pulsed lasing in dyedoped nematic microdroplets is sensitive to strain, temperature and presence of molecules that change molecular orientation at the interface. Omnidirectional 3D lasing was demonstrated in droplets of chiral nematic liquid crystals that form 3D Bragg-onion resonators. We present recent progress in this field, including electric tuning of 3D lasing from chiral nematic droplets and self-assembly of ferroelectric smectic-C* microdroplets with the onion-Bragg structure. We show that anisotropic fibres could be self-assembled from smectic liquid crystals.