Chiral beam splitters based on cholesteric blue phase liquid crystals (Conference Presentation)

A chiral beamsplitter is an optical component that can split left- and right-handed circularly polarized light into orthogonal direction. Unlike a widely used linearly-polarized beamsplitter, realization of chiral beamsplitter by laser fabricated-gyroid crystal is just recently reported. However, due to its low circular dichroism ratio and limitation of applicable light wavelength which couldn't be reduced further below microwave region, chiral beamsplitter is still far from real application. Here we approach differently by using liquid crystalline cholesteric blue phases (BPs) which possess self-alignment 3D chiral structures. Our chiral beam splitters based on BPs achieved high circular dichroism extinction ratio and could become a useful component for developing integrated circuit especially in visible wavelength and UV region. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations were also performed along with experiments to support our hypothesis.