Lasing stability and fast tuning method of liquid crystal lasers toward application of swept light sources

Abstract

In recent years, much attention has been focused on swept light source for applications such as optical coherence tomography and LiDAR. Our research so far have investigated the improvement of lasing stability by means of periodic position change from a piezo stage and the method of fast tuning in lasing wavelength by means of cholesteric liquid crystal gels. In this study, we demonstrate swept light source based on cholesteric liquid crystal lasers by the combination of those methods on lasing stability and tuning, resulting in laser scanning system with a blazed diffraction grating.