Tunable nonlinear liquid-crystal photonic crystals

Summary form only given. Nematic liquid crystals (NLC) possess very broadband (400 nm to 20 /spl mu/m) birefringence and transparency, and extraordinarily large optical nonlinearity. In this paper, we report a novel approach of directly writing permanent (but electrically switchable) 2-D holographic gratings on pure liquid crystalline structures fabricated with well established alignment surfaces. Our theoretical analysis shows that such structures exhibit tunable bandgap, and will also enable super-prism beam steering effects.