Analog smectic C* ferroelectric liquid crystal Fabry-Perot optical tunable filter

The first analog smectic C* ferroelectric liquid crystal tunable filter designed for the application of wavelength-division-multiplexing optical communication systems is presented. The filter demonstrated has a switching time of /spl sim/400 μs, a tuning range of 14 nm at /spl lambda/=1550 nm, and a very small insertion loss of 0.7 dB.