Fast switching ferroelectric liquid crystal Pancharatnam-Berry lens.

A ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) cell with continuously alignment structure is realized by a polarization hologram method for fabricating a Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) lens, which is employed as a concave/convex lens. The PB phase can be maintained by the optical axis in-plane switching; meanwhile, its diffraction efficiency can be tuned in a certain range by electrically controlling azimuthal angle and optical biaxiality of the smectic helical structure realized by deformed helix ferroelectric liquid crystals. The measured diffraction efficiency of the fabricated device is up to 87% and the response time can be 300µs with a low electric voltage. The FLC PB lens can have potential applications in existing optical devices and the realization of FLC with continuous alignment structure can be further used for other LC-based optical devices.

Integrated and reconfigurable optical paths based on stacking optical functional films.

A strategy for integrated and reconfigurable optical paths based on stacking optical functional films is proposed. It is demonstrated by stacking two liquid crystal polymer q-plates and one quarter-wave plate for vector vortex beams generation. The topological charge and polarization order of generated vector vortex beams can be controlled independently by stacking and reordering different optical films with repeated adhesive ability. It supplies a low-cost, light-weight and versatile technique for reducing the volume of free-space optical system and has a great potential in optical researches and applications.

Photo-aligned ferroelectric liquid crystals in microchannels.

In this Letter we disclose a method to realize a good alignment of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) in microchannels, based on photo-alignment. The sulfonic azo dye used in our research offers variable anchoring energy depending on the irradiation energy and thus provides good control on the FLC alignment in microchannels. The good FLC alignment has been observed only when anchoring energy normalized to the capillary diameter is less than the elastic energy of the FLC helix. The same approach can also be used for the different microstructures viz. photonic crystal fibers, microwaveguides, etc. which gives an opportunity for designing a photonic devices based on FLC.