Enhancing cholesteric liquid crystal laser performance using a cholesteric reflector.

A high performance dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) laser is demonstrated by incorporating a passive CLC reflector to the active cell. The polarization-conserved CLC reflector effectively increases the distributed feedback cavity length which, in turn, results in a significant enhancement in lasing efficiency and a dramatic reduction in beam divergence. The lasing characteristics are still dominated by the circularly polarized light with the same sense as the cholesteric helix.