Liquid‐Crystal Lasers: Recent Advances and Future Opportunities

Liquid crystal (LC) lasers use a layer of chiral nematic liquid crystal to form a self‐organising resonant cavity. When doped with fluorescent dye and suitably excited, they form versatile micro‐lasers with high efficiencies, low thresholds, and selective wavelength emission across a continuous range of the visible spectrum. This, combined with their scalable fabrication, makes them attractive candidates for a wide variety of photonic applications, including laser displays. This paper includes a review of the principles of operation, of recent enhancements that are advancing the technology closer to market, and concludes with demonstrations of LC lasers used for medical imaging and low‐speckle holography.