Albeit, the first observations of lasing from liquid-crystal media were recorded forty years ago, still the engineering of materials and microstructures providing laser light on-demand, generated in-situ, seems to be one of the most important fields of photonic materials engineering. Here we give a snapshot of the research done on laser emission from different liquid-crystal media and structures.
An extended study of the lasing induced in various periodic, self-assembled LC structures and artificial resonant structures tuned with liquid crystals is presented. We show observations of lasing obtained in dual-frequency-based, near defect-less, cholesteric structures, exhibiting a relatively big Q-factor. We report newly observed, topologically protected lasing from 3D, dye-doped, highly ordered macroscopic (of the diameter of several millimeters) monodomain samples of blue phase structures BFI and BFII.
The unique lasing with two coherent beams with an opposite circular polarization, emitted from the custom-made microcavity formed between two, distributed Bragg reflectors is shown. An emission from a similar cavity with a perovskite emitter is also discussed.
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