Electrical and Thermal Tuning of Band Structure and Defect Modes in Multilayer Photonic Crystals

We describe the main results previously studied concerning the thermal and electrical tuning of photonic band gap structures and the temperature-dependent defect modes in multilayer photonic liquid crystals using nematic liquid crystal slabs in a twisted configuration. In addition to this, we present new results regarding the electrical control of defect modes in such multilayer structures. In order to achieve this goal, we establish and solve numerically the equation governing the twisted nematic configurations under the action of the external electric field by assuming arbitrary anchoring conditions at the boundaries. After this, we write Maxwell\u27s equations in a 4 × 4 matrix representation and, by using the matrix transfer technique, we obtain the transmittance and reflectance for incident circularly polarized waves