Lowring Lasing Threshold in Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystal Structure with Different Anisotropies

Cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells were fabricated using three kinds of nematic liquid crystal (NLC) materials with different optical birefringent anisotropies Δn. A larger Δn of NLCs results in a larger photonic band gap (PBG) width and higher density of states (DOS) at the PBG edge for each CLC cell. We were able to lower the threshold energy by a factor of more than two using CLC cells with a broader PBG width.