Wearable and interactive multicolored photochromic fiber display

Endowing flexible and adaptable fiber devices with light-emitting capabilities has the potential to revolutionize the current design philosophy of intelligent,wearable interactive devices.However,significant challenges remain in developing fiber devices when it comes to achieving uniform and customizable light effects while utilizing lightweight hardware.Here,we introduce a mass-produced,wearable,and interactive photochromic fiber that provides uniform multicolored light control.We designed independent waveguides inside the fiber to maintain total internal reflection of light as it traverses the fiber.The impact of excessive light leakage on the overall illuminance can be reduced by utilizing the saturable absorption effect of fluorescent materials to ensure light emission uniformity along the transmission direction.In addition,we coupled various fluorescent composite materials inside the fiber to achieve artificially controllable spectral radiation of multiple color systems in a single fiber.We prepared fibers on mass-produced kilometer-long using the thermal drawing method.The fibers can be directly integrated into daily wearable devices or clothing in various patterns and combined with other signal input components to control and display patterns as needed.This work provides a new perspective and inspiration to the existing field of fiber display interaction,paving the way for future human–machine integration.

Field programmable topological edge array

Valley Hall topological photonic crystals,inspired by topological insulators in condensed matter physics,have provided a promising solution to control the flow of light.Recently,the dynamic manipulation property of topological photonic crystals has been widely studied.Here,we propose a novel solution for programmable valley photonic crystals,called field programmable topological edge array(FPTEA),based on the field reorientation property of nematic liquid crystals and robust valley-protected edge modes.FPTEA is composed of an array of graphene-like lattices with C_(3)symmetry,in which the birefringence of liquid crystal is larger than 0.5105.Due to the dielectric anisotropy of liquid crystals being sensitive to external fields such as light,heat,electric,and magnetic fields,each lattice is tunable,and the topological propagation routes and even the lattice parameters can be dynamically changed while changing the distribution of external fields.We numerically demonstrate three methods of composing an FPTEA device to design arbitrary passive optical devices by electric driving,thermal inducing,or UV writing.These results show the great application potential of liquid crystals in topological photonic crystals,and enrich the design of programmable integrated topological devices with broad working bandwidth ranging from microwave to visible light.