Photonic properties of heliconical liquid crystals.

Periodic birefringence is today extensively explored as an interesting route for controlling the flow of light. Distinctly, complex fluids with periodic modulations of birefringence can perform as photonic crystals, with the main examples being cholesteric and blue phases birefringent profiles. Here we demonstrate the characteristics of light propagation in heliconical liquid crystal and demonstrate their tunable optical and photonic properties, specifically as one-dimensional photonic crystals, in the regime of heliconical pitch comparable to the wavelength of light.