A review of recent advances in molecular assembly of liquid crystalline chiral photonic crystals is presented, particularly on fabrication of extraordinarily thick [>2 mm] cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC), and large-areal size monocrystalline Blue-phase liquid crystals (BPLC). CLC’s as 1-D chiral photonic crystals possess large ultrafast optical nonlinearity suitable for self-compression, polarization switching and modulation of complex vector beams. These super thick and highly nonlinear CLC’s are estimated to be capable of all optical switching [π- phase shift] at sub-picosecond (~0.1 x 10-12 s) speed with low threshold energy fluence of ~ 0.25 μJ/cm2. Large areal size monocrystalline BPLC’s will preserve the phase front uniformity in free-space image processing and yield better efficiency, resolution, and image/signal qualities than their typical polycrystalline counterparts.
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