Liquid Crystalline Nonlinear Optical Metamaterials with Low-Loss Tunable Negative-Zero-Positive Refractive Indices

摘要

We describe a class of liquid crystalline photonic metamaterials that exhibit tunable negative-zero-positive refractive indices. As a result of the extreme sensitivity of the nematic liquid crystal constituent, these metamaterials also exhibit extraordinarily large optical nonlinearities associated with the optical field induced director axis reorientation and birefringence change. Incorporation of a gain medium such as laser dye reduces losses of the metamaterial.