In recent years, how to manipulate light flexibly and effectively has become a central concern in the development of photon-based information industry technologies. The emergence of topological physics has brought new degrees of freedom to photonics and opened up a new research field of topological photonics. Topologically protected edge states provide a new way to achieve locally enhanced photonic modes, which can significantly improve the output performance of lasers and are immune to disorderand certain types of structural defects caused by processing errors. However, this property also makes the topological laser wavelength difficult to adjust flexibly. Lasers operating in the visible light band hold significant value for fields such asdisplay, sensing, processing, and quantum information. However, due to the limitation of high spatial resolution processing technology, most of the current topological laser designs are based on micron-level feature size photonics structures, and their laser wavelengths are in the infrared band. The fabrication of high-performance visible-band topological lasers remains a challenge, especially when tunable and controllable polarization characteristics are required. Therefore, a natural question arises: Is it possible to use natural materials with photonic band gaps to achieve low-cost tunable topological lasers?
Recently, the research group led by Professors Zhang Xinzheng, Professor Chen Zhigang and Professor Xu Jingjun from College of Physics and TEDA Institute of Applied Physics published their latest research findings in the field of topological lasers. Their paper, titled “Tunable Topological Lasing of Circularly Polarized Light in a Soft-matter-based Superlattice” was published in Laser & Photonics Reviews. They designed a superlattice based on cholesteric liquid crystal soft matter and laser-active polymer, and realized a tunable topological laser based on soft matter superlattice in the visible band for the first time.
Nankai University was the primary institution involved in this work. The co-first authors are doctoral students Wang Yu and Yang Donghao from Nankai University and visiting scholar Gao Shaohua from Taiyuan University of Science and Technology. Collaborators include Professor Irena Drevensek-Olenik from the University of Ljubljana, Professor Wu Qiang from Nankai University, and foreign postdoctoral fellow Marouen Chemingui. Professor Zhang Xinzheng and Professor Irena Drevensek-Olenik have a long-standing collaboration and were approved in 2020 for the Tianjin “Belt and Road” Joint Research Laboratory (Research Center) - “Nankai University Liquid Crystal Photonics China-Slovenia Joint Research Center”. The related work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The paper can be accessed at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1002/lpor.202200643.
