Sensors at Your Fibre Tips: A Novel Liquid Crystal- Based Photonic Transducer for Sensing Systems

Recent advances in both nano-fabrication and nano- materials open up rich new avenues in the optical sensing area. Using nano-grid electrodes, nanometer-scale photo-alignment layers and deformed helix ferro-electric liquid crystals with a sub-wavelength helix pitch of 150 nm, we have realised a fully integrated polarisation-based photonic transducer which exhibits fast response to an applied voltage/electric field, excellent linearity and allows multiplexing using standard, low cost telecom optical fibers.