Two ways of employing cholesteric liquid crystals in tunable dye lasers are considered: the cholesterics as distributed feedback medium and the cholesterics as resonator mirrors. In the dye doped distributed feedback cholesteric liquid crystal lasers the frequency tuning is achieved exploiting light induced effects or using a specially designed cell assembling a chiral dopant concentration gradient in combination with suitable distribution of different dyes. Another approach represents the lasing in a multilayer system consisting of a dye doped isotropic solvent sandwiched between two CLC layers.
KeywordsLiquid CrystalsLasers
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