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Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, Vol.611, No.1, 1-13, 2015
Dielectric Multilayer Including Azobenzene Polymer Liquid Crystal with Non-quarter-wave Stack
Dielectric multilayer including azobenzene polymer liquid crystal acts as a one-dimensional photonic crystal and has optical-switchable reflection bands. The reflection intensity can be controlled by irradiation of ultraviolet (UV) or visible light, in which the optical switch is based on cis-trans photoisomerization. An increase in the number of layers prevents photoresponse in the multilayer including azobenzen layers because UV or visible light for control cis-trans isomerization hardly reach the bottom of the multilayer due to exponential decay of light intensity. In this study, the multilayer consisting of thin azobenzene layers is investigated. According to numerical calculations, the non-quarter-wave structured multilayer has multiwavelength reflection band. Angular dependence of reflection color from multiwavelength stopband is also studied using the XYZ color space. The non-quarter-wave multilayer suppresses reflection color change compared with conventional quarter-wave multilayer.