Design and application of self-assembled photonic crystals

Abstract

Taking advantage of the coupling between CC film and liquid crystals we constructed tunable photonic crystals with optical response to temperature, electric field and photo-irradiation. Further, we designed optically switchable birefringent photonic crystal by controlling the orientation of liquid crystal molecules in stretched polymer inverse opal. We also assembled colloidal spheres to micro-beads by evaporation of the homogeneous colloidal emulsion droplets and applied in biomolecule detection and uniform panel display arrays. Finally, it could be anticipated that self-assembly colloidal crystals would have more and more applications in the fields of nano-materials, optical devices, biology and so on.