Citation
Otón Martínez, Eva and Morawiak, Przemyslaw and Galadyk, Katarzyna and Oton Sánchez, José Manuel and Piecek, Wiktor
(2020).
Fast self-assembly of macroscopic blue phase 3D photonic crystals.
"Optics Express", v. 28
(n. 12);
pp. 18202-18211.
https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.393197.
Abstract
Blue phase (BP) liquid crystals are materials with unique self-assembling properties.
They can be regarded as 3D photonic crystals as they organize in 3D cubic structures with sub-micrometer range periodicity and display selective optical bandgaps. Yet, the obtained BP crystals are usually polycrystalline or micrometer-sized monocrystals. Producing large BP monocrystals has proven to be a challenging and time-consuming endeavor, due to BP crystal growth being notoriously slow and the complex requirements for achieving a reasonable size and monocrystalline structure.
In this work we successfully obtained large BP monocrystals (single lattice orientation) by fast self-assembly. Our fabrication process, which is about 100x faster than in previous reported research, uses relatively simple techniques, therefore demonstrating a considerable improvement towards the manufacturing of 3D photonic crystals.