Electrooptic Characterization of Tunable Cylindrical Liquid Crystal Lenses

Abstract

In this work, one-dimensional arrays of cylindrical adaptive liquid crystal lenses were manufactured and characterized; and test devices were filled with nematic liquid crystal. Comb interdigitated electrodes were designed as a mask pattern for the control electrode on the top glass substrates. A radial graded refractive index along each microsized lens was achieved by fabricating a layer of high resistance sheet deposited as a control electrode. These tunable lenses were switched by applying amplitude and frequency optimized waveforms on the control electrode. Phase profiles generated by the radial electric field distribution on each lens were measured by a convectional interferometric technique.

Keywords:

• Liquid crystal lens
• optimized waveforms
• phase measurement
• graded index

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain (grant no.TEC2009-13991-C02-01) and Comunidad de Madrid (grant no. S2009/ESP-1781).