Programmable orientation of blue phase soft photonic crystal

Abstract

Understanding the structure formation and its underlying physical mechanism is a fundamental topic in condensed matter systems, with both academic and practical implications. Soft matter is playing a remarkable role in current era of information explosion, demonstrating enormous potential in integrated functional photonics. As unique soft photonic crystals with cubic symmetries, not only liquid crystalline blue phases (BPs) have circularly polarized selective reflection and ultra-fast electro-optical response, but also their three-dimensional photonic structures increase degrees-of-freedom for multiplexed optical modulation. In the thriving field of soft-matter-based photonics, precise and programmable engineering of BP crystal orientation is of vital importance for planar optical elements, which remains a challenging task due to the complexity of the nucleation process as well as the interaction between the BP building blocks and the boundary conditions. Aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of how to tailor the orientation of BP crystals for the photonic applications of next generation, here we discuss the solutions for uniformity improvement and orientation control of BP crystals, about which a few of examples in combination with the underlying mechanisms are explained. In addition, the remaining challenges and the efforts that are expected are also reviewed. We expect this work provides a deeper understanding of phase transitions and resulting structures in soft crystals, which may open encouraging perspectives for their applications in photonics, biosensing, interfacial, and chemical engineering.