Switchable optical elements incorporating polymer structure and a liquid crystal material offer devices with a voltage controlled spatially varying phase difference at low cost. The polymer structure may be fabricated using established replication techniques and suitable liquid crystal materials are readily available. The voltage controlled effective refractive indices in the liquid crystal regions allow the path length difference between polymer regions and LC regions to be modulated facilitating voltage switchable diffractive devices. This approach has been used to make switchable diffraction gratings and these have been demonstrated in a reconfigurable optical system. Using multiple devices and enabling the diffraction effect of each in turn offers the possibility of reconfiguration of optical systems. In this demonstration two cascaded switchable diffraction gratings with periods of 100µm and 30µm respectively have been used to provide wavelength range selection reconfiguration for a photodiode array detector. The optical reconfiguration switched between first order diffraction from the 100µm grating and first order diffraction from the 30µm grating. This allows a given wavelength range to be covered with a lower resolution array detector optically switching between different wavelength ranges. This might allow the use of more compact detectors or detectors with larger pixels. The grating periods are set at the time of fabrication but may be designed to cover the wavelength ranges required of the particular application.
Switchable optical elements incorporating polymer structure and a liquid crystal material offer devices with a voltage controlled phase difference at low cost. The polymer structure may be fabricated using established replication techniques. Earlier work has demonstrated such devices with good optical quality and high diffraction efficiencies. Such a material allows the director to be actively driven either towards homeotropic or planar alignment depending upon the frequency of the drive waveform. For this investigation devices were fabricated using a dual frequency liquid crystal with a polymer structure. Use of a liquid crystal material with a dielectric anisotropy inversion has the advantage in this case that the liquid crystal orientation is less dependent upon surface forces for switching effects. Liquid crystal reorientation and therefore optical switching is field driven into different orientations. Measurement s of the intensity of the transmitted diffraction orders as a function of time were carried out as means to compare the liquid crystal reorientation times for devices with different gratings. The same devices were driven in two ways; changing driving frequency so switching was always field driven or by changing applied voltage so that switching was partly determined by surface forces. It would be expected to observe faster optical switching due to an applied field; this was not always observed to be the case, this may be due to differences in the initial state between field dominated and surface force dominated initial conditions. Work to understand this more fully is in progress.
Switchable optical elements incorporating polymer structure and a liquid crystal material offer devices with a voltage controlled phase difference at low cost. The polymer structure may be fabricated using established replication techniques. Earlier work has demonstrated such devices with good optical quality and high diffraction efficiencies but with geometric restrictions due to the formation of defects within the device in some situations. Earlier work used surface forces from an aligning surface to establish the director orientation of the liquid crystal. In this work improved control of the director is achieved through the use of a liquid crystal material exhibiting a reversal of the dielectric anisotropy at different driving frequencies. Such a material allows the director to be actively driven either towards homeotropic or planar alignment depending upon the frequency of the drive waveform. Use of a liquid crystal material with a dielectric anisotropy inversion has the advantage in this case that the liquid crystal orientation is less dependent upon surface forces.
As the phenomenon "color" is involved in almost each production where is a great demand for inexpensive and precise colorimeters. Today there are in principle two kinds of colorimeters: three-channel colorimeters (which are cheap but not accurate) and array spectrometers (which offer a high accuracy at a high price). Liquid crystals have the potential to allow accurate color measurements at a low price. We show three different schemes of colorimeters and actual measurements. The accuracy of our colorimeters is better than 0.005 for each color coordinate.
Liquid Crystal Filled Polymer Structure (LiCFiPS) Devices consist of a polymer structure, which performs the desired spatial phase modulation of the incident light, filled with lqiuid crystal to permit modulation of this optical function. Potentially fabrication of this type of device, by established polymer hot rolling or embossing techniques, may be carried out at very low cost. Devices incorporating a complex polymer structure will inevitably have liquid crystal aligned at varying orientations to the surface. Switchable gratings with the liquid crystal aligned in the plane of the grating but either parallel or perpendicular to the grating rulings have been investigated as the two extremes of alignment. Good results have been achieved for parallel aligned devices, however devices with the liquid crystal aligned perpendicular to the grating lines show defects and inhomogeneities. Computational models of these devices show features that correspond well with the observed switching characteristics and have been used to explore routes to the design of improved devices. While such devices might not offer the ultimate versatility of matrix addressed SLM devices they do offer switchable optical devices at very low cost.
Multiple pass liquid crystal devices have potential applications as wavelength selective elements for both illumination and measurement systems, the peak in the wavelength transmission of a single birefringence device when repeatedly applied gives a narrow peak in transmission. Most liquid crystal display devices are optimized for operation at 550 nm where the effects of dispersion are of secondary importance, however in applications using multiple devices to create a tuneable filter the effects of dispersion are particularly significant. Typically birefringence data is only available at a specific wavelength or at a specific temperature, this is especially true of commercial liquid crystal that are characterized for 550 nm device operation. To allow computation of both temperature and wavelength dependence the variation of liquid crystal refractive indices over a two dimensional temperature -- wavelength plane has been extrapolated from single wavelength or single temperature data. The effect of this variation in the birefringence of the liquid crystal material in possible filter configurations to determine the wavelength dependence has been evaluated. Though reducing the effective operating range of a given device design a useful tuneable filter function is still achieved. To achieve the same tuning range as would be predicted without the effects of dispersion a more complex stack of devices is required.
Liquid crystal filled polymer structures provide switchable optical devices at low cost and with low driving voltages. One such device is a switchable optical grating, current models of these do not fully explain the effects seen within the devices that have been constructed. A new modeling technique has been implemented to better understand these. A comparison of the use of the Oseen-Frank and Landau-De Gennes free energy equations is given. Data from an experimental device is compared to that from simulation and it is shown that the simulation provides both similar results and an aid to understanding the real device.
Films of Poly-Tetra-Fluoro-Ethylene (PTFE) have been shown to be very effective alignment agents for liquid crystal materials. Such films may be deposited in a one step dry process offering advantages in terms of both time and simplicity over deposition of polyimide or SiO2 alignment layers. This is most appropriate for applications where a test device is required as part of a rapid prototype for ergonomic and similar testing. Earlier work has identified suitable deposition parameters (temperature, surface pressure, velocity) for production of PTFE films but with single films there is still typically some variation in the alignment due to the machined surface of the PTFE bar itself. In this work multiple film deposition using a 'step and repeat' has been investigated as means of achieving improved alignment uniformity and has been found effective in test devices of several cm2. Electro-Optic measurements on a multiple pixel test device show little spatial variation in the threshold voltage illustrating the possibility of matrix addressing a PTFE aligned prototype device. In conclusion PTFE films offer a very rapid method of producing alignment layers for devices having reproducible and uniform electro-optic characteristics.
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