Applications of Tamm plasmon-liquid crystal devices

ABSTRACT

The Tamm-plasmon-polariton (TPP) occurs at the interface between a metallic film and the photonic-crystal (PC) substrate. Unlike conventional surface-plasmon-polariton (SPP), TPP can be directly excited by both the transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) electromagnetic waves without using additional coupling optics. The fact that the optical functionality of most plasmonics devices is determined after fabrication limits their applications. Tunable SPP devices by applying liquid crystals (LCs) have been widely demonstrated due to their large birefringence and easy controllability via external stimuli. However, actively tuning TPP is difficult because the localised electric field is between the metallic film and PC substrate, the change of refractive index above the metallic film has only small influences on TPP. This article is intended to briefly review recent progress towards using LCs for actively tuning TPP devices. Not only TPP devices can gain benefits from LCs, we will also discuss the applications of TPP for measuring the anisotropy of the alignment films of LC devices. The sensitivity of the proposed scheme will be discussed.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Tamm-plasmon-polariton
• tunable plasmonic devices
• liquid crystal alignment
• anisotropic films

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan for financially supporting this research under contract MOST 107-2112-M-009 -007 -MY3. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan for financially supporting this research under contract [MOST 107-2112-M-009 -007 -MY3].