Chiral Photonics

Chiral Photonics, Inc. is a photonics company based in Pine Brook, New Jersey, founded in 1999. The company is developing a new class of optical devices based on twisting glass optical fibers. These in-fiber devices aim to displace discrete optical elements such as lasers, filters and sensors. They benefit from optical fiber’s transmission efficiency, robustness and ease of integration.

The company hopes that its manufacturing process, which is completely automated and scalable, will result, for example, in communications lasers that are fraction of the cost and three times more efficient than today’s semiconductor lasers. Chiral Photonics is also developing chirality in polymeric thin films which, for instance, would enable high quality projection displays.

Chiral Photonics had received funding from venture capital, angel, and government sources including a US$2 million National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program award in 2004.

Chiral Photonics’ technology is an outgrowth of the 1997 discovery by two of the company's co-founders, Azriel Genack and Victor Kopp, that lasing in cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) films is a result of their unique self-assembling helical (chiral) microstructure. CLCs are the thin-film material often used to fabricate fish tank thermometers or mood rings, that change color with temperature changes. They change color because their molecules are arranged in a helical or chiral arrangement and with temperature the pitch of that helical structure changes, reflecting different wavelengths of light.

Drs. Genack and Kopp decided to pursue the possibility that CLCs, with their natural chiral structure, could provide a platform for a versatile new class of photonic devices. In biomimetic fashion, Chiral Photonics has abstracted the self-assembled structure of the organic CLCs to produce analogous optical devices using tiny lengths of inorganic, twisted fiber. Designing novel microforming towers, the company is able to fabricate devices based on fibers that can be twisted through more than 25,000 revolutions over a one-inch length.

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