Electrical tuning of index-guiding photonic liquid crystal fibers

In the great majority of previous studies devoted to photonic liquid crystal fibers (PLCFs), photonic band-gap propagation was investigated since the refractive index of silica glass fibers is lower than that of most liquid crystals. In this work we focus on electrical tuning of index-guiding PLCFs based on host-fibers made from multi-component glasses with an enhanced value of the refractive index. The impact of an electric field on light propagation in index-guiding PLCFs has been carefully studied and the effective tuning of phase birefringence, attenuation and polarization dependent losses has been observed experimentally.