Photonic liquid crystal fibers (PLCFs) have been studied for over a decade as an emerging field of sensing and telecommunication devices. Exciting properties of liquid crystals (LCs) infiltrating photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) can be additionally tuned by doping with various materials that are sensitive to external influences, such as an electric field or temperature. Among them, metallic nanoparticles (NPs) are gathering a great interest, due to their potential applications. NPs can be used to highly influence material properties of LCs as dielectric anisotropy, elastic constants, and viscosity. This may lead to many desirable effects, such as a decrease of the Fredericks threshold voltage or reduction of LC switching times. In this paper we doped a nematic LC with 2-nm gold (Au) and 8-nm silver (Ag) NPs, and infiltrated the prepared mixtures into photonic crystal fibers. We examined the influence of this doping in two different electric field systems, one with two flat copper electrodes, and second with four copper microelectrodes. Our results indicate that metallic NP (both Au and Ag) doping enhances sensitivity of the PLCF-based sensors to an electric field and decreases the threshold voltage. Additionally, due to smaller distances between the electrodes, the proposed four microelectrode system requires lower voltages to effectively tune the PLCF.
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