Electrically Controlled Liquid Crystal Microlens Array Based on Single-Crystal Graphene Coupling Alignment for Plenoptic Imaging

Autor: Mingce Chen, Qi Shao, Wenda He, Dong Wei, Chai Hu, Jiashuo Shi, Kewei Liu, Haiwei Wang, Changsheng Xie, Xinyu Zhang
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Micromachines, Vol 11, Iss 12, p 1039 (2020)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2072-666X
33734445
DOI: 10.3390/mi11121039
Popis: As a unique electric-optics material, liquid crystals (LCs) have been used in various light-control applications. In LC-based light-control devices, the structural alignment of LC molecules is of great significance. Generally, additional alignment layers are required for LC lens and microlens, such as rubbed polyimide (PI) layers or photoalignment layers. In this paper, an electrically controlled liquid crystal microlens array (EC-LCMLA) based on single-crystal graphene (SCG) coupling alignment is proposed. A monolayer SCG with high conductivity and initial anchoring of LC molecules was used as a functional electrode, thus no additional alignment layer is needed, which effectively simplifies the basic structure and process flow of conventional LCMLA. Experiments indicated that a uniform LC alignment can be acquired in the EC-LCMLA cell by the SCG coupling alignment effect. The common optical properties including focal lengths and point spread function (PSF) were measured experimentally. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed EC-LCMLA has good focusing performance in the visible to near-infrared range. Moreover, the plenoptic imaging in Galilean mode was achieved by integrating the proposed EC-LCMLA with photodetectors. Digital refocusing was performed to obtain a rendering image of the target.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals