As a light routing medium, glass fiber is the gold standard. Its many benefits are well-known - easy integration, high power handling, tolerance of harsh environments, flexible form factor, variable wavelength accommodation, low cost and scalable manufacturing. Chiral Photonics' Helica™ product line shares each and every one of these benefits because this full family of building block components - sensors, couplers, filters, and lasers – are all-glass and all-fiber, through and through.

Each Helica™ in-fiber component is formed by twisting fiber to form a helical, or chiral, core within the fiber. The twist profile determines the fiber's functionality. This tightly controlled, scalable process developed at Chiral Photonics over the last decade results in components with exceptional performance without the need for photosensitivity, or thin-films that can limit component performance and applicability.

Besides glass, chirality is manifest in other media, fully sharing the benefits of those particular media as well. Chiral Photonics’ polyHelica™ thin-film product line, now under development, applies chirality to a polymer film to yield a flexible, emissive display. At a fraction of the cost, weight, and power consumption of today’s projection systems, and at a multiple of its contrast, brightness, and color quality, the polyHelica line promises to enable tomorrow’s displays.

90 second animation produced by National Science Foundation about how chiral photonics works!

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Chiral Photonics is developing products that exploit the unique concurrence of spectral and polarization selectivity that chiral structures offer. The structures are self-assembling or are manufactured via low cost continuous processes that deliver both cost and performance advantages over present technologies.

These efforts are focused on developing an organic, self-assembling thin film laser based on the photonic band gap properties of cholesteric liquid crystals that we have pioneered over the last few years. Chiral Photonics has demonstrated an optically pumped Chiral Thin Film Laser and is working towards an electronically pumped organic laser for which this chiral structure is an ideal feedback system. This development work addresses display, lighting and sensor applications.

Chiral Photonics has discovered that the chiral structure responsible for the photonic band gap behavior in its thin film technology can be abstractly applied to optical fibers for a variety of applications ranging from telecommunications to surgical lasers to biological and chemical analysis to remote sensing. These chiral fiber gratings (CFGs) do not require coherent irradiation of photosensitive glass as in presently used fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) but rather are created in a continuous versatile process from specially prepared preforms.

CFGs made with a grating period comparable to the optical wavelength, make possible the production of strongly modulated periodic structures exhibiting the favorable optical characteristics found in photonic band gap (PBG) materials. These CFGs form an ideal laser feedback structure and when appropriately doped will overcome the barriers that have inhibited the commercial development of single longitudinal and polarization mode fiber lasers. Appropriately varying the pitch of these gratings changes their operational characteristics and determines the products targeted.