Liquid crystal devices for optical communication and information processing systems

This paper reviews liquid crystal optical devices including tunable filters, photonic switches and spatial light modulators, and examines their application to optical communication and information processing systems. Optical processing has three major advantages: massive parallelism, high speed and broad wavebands. Compared with typical optical materials including silica, semiconductors and inorganic electrooptic crystals used in communication systems, a liquid crystal has a number of outstanding features including its large refractive index change and large polarization rotation power at a low voltage. These features make it possible to develop new optical components.