Electro-optical switching by liquid-crystal controlled metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates fast electro-optical switching in a liquid-crystal controlled metasurface, enabling dynamic control of optical resonances with potential applications in tunable photonic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel liquid-crystal metasurface system with millisecond switching times, combining experimental results with numerical simulations to understand reorientation mechanisms.

Findings

Millisecond switching between electric and magnetic resonances achieved.

High sensitivity of liquid crystal reorientation to metasurface symmetry demonstrated.

Numerical simulations support experimental observations.

Abstract

We study the optical response of a metamaterial surface created by a lattice of split-ring resonators covered with a nematic liquid crystal and demonstrate millisecond timescale switching between electric and magnetic resonances of the metasurface. This is achieved due to a high sensitivity of liquid-crystal molecular reorientation to the symmetry of the metasurface as well as to the presence of a bias electric field. Our experiments are complemented by numerical simulations of the liquid-crystal reorientation.