SMP Seminar: Large Area Liquid Crystal Based Lenses

Professor Philip Bos, from the Glenn H Brown Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, USA, will be giving a presentation on his latest work. All welcome to attend.

Liquid Crystal lenses with a diameter of greater than 1 cm and a power of greater than 1 Diopter are of high interest, due to their potential for variable power while maintaining low wavefront distortion. However, the straightforward approach leads to a large cell thickness and slow switching speed. This talk will cover two approaches toward overcoming the slow switching speed problem. The first approach is to add phase resets to a conventional device that are designed to cause a negligible optical effect. The design concept, modelling, fabrication and characterization of a 2 cm, 1.5 Diopter will be presented. The other approach is based on Pancharatnam phase. These devices have the non-intuitive ability to have an almost unbounded optical power while having a large aperture. In addition, the physical structure is a film of only a few microns thick and is easy to manufacture. However, on the down-side, they require polarized light and have a restricted optical bandwidth and angle of acceptance. As an example of what can be done with this technology: the basic design concept, modelling, fabrication and characterization of a non-mechanical zoom lens based on Pancharatnam phase will be presented. Doug Bryant, HsienHui Cheng, Kun Gao, Afsoon Jamali and Liwei Li.

Host: Professor Cliff Jones