Chinese Journal of Liquid Crystals and Displays, Volume. 38, Issue 10, 1330(2023)

Flexible free-standing cholesteric liquid crystal films for multi-color reflectors

Jing YAN1、*, Xiang-wen FAN1, Ke QU1, Ying YU2,3, and Ruo-zhou LI2,3、**
Author Affiliations
  • 1College of Electronic and Optical Engineering,Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Nanjing 210023,China
  • 2College of Integrated Circuit Science and Engineering,Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Nanjing 210023,China
  • 3National and Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of RF Integration and Micro-Assembly Technology,Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Nanjing 210023,China
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    Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs), one-dimensional chiral soft photonic crystals, have a wide application in fields such as security tags, nanolasers, and sensing. In this paper, a multi-step UV patterning curing method combined with a washout-refill process was used to realize multi-color free-standing flexible CLC film reflectors. A label printer is used to print PET patterned mask, and a polymerizable CLC material is UV cured to obtain the free-standing flexible patterned CLC film reflector. Based on this, the uncured material was washed-out, refilled with CLC of different chiral dopant content, and the patterned UV light was re-exposed to realize a multi-color flexible free-standing CLC reflector. The effects of different incidence angles, bending radius of curvature and temperature on the optical properties of the reflector are investigated. The experimental results show that the multi-color free-standing reflectors prepared by the above method have good flexibility, the Bragg reflection center wavelength is basically constant at different radii of curvature, and it is red-shifted with the increasing temperature, which has good linearity. This proposed multi-color free-standing flexible film reflector protocol can further expand CLC’s applications in the fields of display, sensing, laser protection and micro-nano optics.

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    Jing YAN, Xiang-wen FAN, Ke QU, Ying YU, Ruo-zhou LI. Flexible free-standing cholesteric liquid crystal films for multi-color reflectors[J]. Chinese Journal of Liquid Crystals and Displays, 2023, 38(10): 1330

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    Paper Information

    Category: Research Articles

    Received: Jun. 19, 2023

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: Oct. 25, 2023

    The Author Email: Jing YAN (jing.yan@njupt.edu.cn), Ruo-zhou LI (lirz@njupt.edu.cn)

    DOI:10.37188/CJLCD.2023-0218

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