Circularly polarized laser emission induced by supramolecular chirality in cholesteric liquid crystals

This paper describes the circularly polarized spectroscopic studies on absorption and emission of an achiral fluorescent dye embedded in cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs). Optical excitation of the dye-doped CLC cell with a linearly polarized laser brought about the two laser emission peaks at longer and shorter reflection band edges of the CLC host through the internal laser feedback effect of the one-dimensional CLC photonic band-gap. At this stage, the optically excited laser emissions showed circularly polarized characteristic, even though the excitation beam was linearly polarized. The circularly polarized direction of the laser emission was determined by molecular chirality of only few mol% of the enantiomeric chiral dopant in this molecular system.