A polarisation-free blue phase liquid crystal lens with enhanced tunable focal length range

ABSTRACT

A polarisation-free blue phase liquid crystal (BPLC) lens with enhanced tunable focal length range is proposed. A matched conventional glass lens is introduced on a BPLC lens to increase the range of the tunable focal length. The focal length of the BPLC lens can be switched from positive to negative, the negative lens-like phase profile can be neutralised by the conventional glass lens to get an infinity focal length and the positive lens-like phase profile can be enhanced by the conventional glass lens to get a shorter focal length. The minimum focal length can be decreased to almost half of that after the proposed method is adopted in our simulation. Moreover, the proposed BPLC lens exhibits a good polarisation-free feature and the optical effect is relatively good.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Liquid crystal lens
• blue phase
• tunable focal length
• polarisation-free

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61535007 and by The Equipment Research Program in Advance of China under Grant No. JZX2017-1570/Y464.