Abstract

Liquid crystalline materials with a cycloidal molecular orientation pattern are attractive for fabricating diffractive waveplates, diffracting incident light regardless of its polarization state into left- and/or right-circularly polarized light only in the $+1$st and/or $-1$st orders, applicable as next-generation optical devices. However, large-area high-speed processing of such molecular orientation is a challenge, since even state-of-the-art photoalignment methods require a precise spatial modulation of the polarization states of incident light, e.g., polarization holograms. Here, we propose and demonstrate that unpolarized light could easily generate cycloidal molecular orientation patterns over large areas in a single step merely by using our recently developed method of “scanning wave photopolymerization” with a simple optical setup. Importantly, the processing time for fabricating millimeter-scale films was significantly decreased to less than a few minutes. Detailed investigation revealed that the resultant film showed the desired diffraction behavior with a diffraction efficiency of 50%.

© 2019 Optical Society of America

Direct fabrication of a q-plate array by scanning wave photopolymerization

Miho Aizawa, Megumi Ota, Kyohei Hisano, Norihisa Akamatsu, Takeo Sasaki, Christopher J. Barrett, and Atsushi Shishido
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(5) D47-D51 (2019)

Cycloidal diffractive waveplates fabricated using a high-power diode-pumped solid-state laser operating at 532 nm

Luciano De Sio, Nelson Tabiryan, Michael McConney, and Timothy J. Bunning
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(5) D136-D139 (2019)

Geometric phase diffractive waveplate singularity arrays [Invited]

Gary F. Walsh, Luciano De Sio, and Nelson Tabiryan
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(5) D126-D135 (2019)

Interference-free and single exposure to generate continuous cycloidal alignment for large-area liquid crystal devices

Da Chen, Huijie Zhao, Kexin Yan, Dong Xu, Qi Guo, Linghao Sun, Fan Wu, Vladimir G. Chigrinov, and Hoi-Sing Kwok
Opt. Express 27(20) 29332-29339 (2019)

Linear polarization grating combining a circular polarization grating with a special cycloidal diffractive quarter waveplate

W. Chen, Z. Zhao, C. Wang, H. Li, R. Wei, S. Zhang, Z. Peng, Y. Liu, Q. Wang, Q. Mu, and L. Xuan
Opt. Express 27(23) 33378-33390 (2019)