Anisotropic liquid crystals for tunable optical negative-index metamaterials

2D reconfigurable negative-index metamaterials incorporating anisotropic LCs have been presented that operate in the near-IR. The anisotropic behavior of the LCs was treated rigorously using the periodic FE-BI full-wave analysis technique. The entries in the permittivity tensor for the LCs can be tuned by changing the director orientation of the LC molecules. There are several apparent design tradeoffs between the two configurations such as number of LC layers employed, biasing requirements, and ease of fabrication.