Nanoscale hyperspectral imaging of tilted cholesteric liquid crystal structures

Aurélie Jullien (1, 2) , Adriana Scarangella (3, 4) , Umberto Bortolozzo (2, 1) , Stefania Residori (2, 1) , Michel Mitov (4, 3)

1 INPHYNI - Institut de Physique de Nice
2 INLN - Institut Non Linéaire de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
3 CEMES-NeO - Nano-Optique et Nanomatériaux pour l'optique
4 CEMES - Centre d'élaboration de matériaux et d'études structurales

Ongoing research on chiral liquid crystals takes advantage of the peculiar behavior of twisted structures subject to curvature. We demonstrate the fine tunability of the characteristics of the bandgap of a cholesteric structure in which the orientation of the helix axis spatially changes. To date, the spectral resolution of the order of 6 nm, herein reached by hyperspectral imaging, has not been solved in tilted helices. A correlation between spectral shifts and spatial twists is thus made possible.

Domaines: Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]

Aurélie Jullien, Adriana Scarangella, Umberto Bortolozzo, Stefania Residori, Michel Mitov. Nanoscale hyperspectral imaging of tilted cholesteric liquid crystal structures. Soft Matter, 2019, 15 (15), pp.3256-3263. ⟨10.1039/c8sm02506a⟩. ⟨hal-02086490⟩