Electrically tunable photo-aligned hybrid double-frequency liquid crystal polarisation grating

ABSTRACT

A polarisation grating (PG) based on the hybrid photo-aligned double-frequency liquid crystal has been demonstrated and fabricated in this paper. The single-order diffraction efficiency is above 95% for circular polarisation incident light. The PG can be driven by 2.5 V/µm electric field with alternating frequency and has no Freedericksz transition threshold. In response time, the rise time and decay time are 650 and 950 , respectively; the sub-millisecond can be achieved under a low driving voltage.

Graphical Abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Polarisation grating
• hybrid alignment
• double-frequency liquid crystal
• driving voltage
• response time

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Rolic Company for their kind support with the photo-alignment material. This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11604327, 11174274, 11174279, 61205021 and 11204299) and the Science Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics.

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 [11604327, 11174274, 11174279, 61205021, 11204299] and Science Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics.